251–260 of 280 posts
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By the way, I made one for Telegram, if you use that: https://gitlab.com/stavros/hn-reply-bot I posted it but not many people seem to use Telegram, or find it useful?
I guess not so many people use telegram. And email somehow fits better the calm pace of discussion here on HN.
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There is one more possibility (relevant to solo devs) - lack of trust that marketing professionals can deliver results. Personally, I do realize how important marketing is and how inadequate my skills in marketing are. But at the same time, my experience contracting out marketing taught me that there are very few good pros and i am much more likely to at best hire someone who has about the same level of experience as…
In general, contracting something out can be useful if you have some specific task to perform. We use a bunch of agencies and other outside firms. But it's almost always for something specific like running a webinar series on $X or providing social media tooling or other things like that. Marketing also covers a very wide spectrum. For a small operation, the person you might hire to create content and/or messaging fo…
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I think it's the hustle of social media to be heard that turns me off. The 'thought leader hustle' feels artificial, manipulative and needy. I think it comes down to what you hear in this very thread, and often expressed by engineers; marketing and advertising to consumers can feel deceitful. Business to business marketing is very different. You present your value to customers, they explore, and reach out when ready…
You can look at is as "hustle on social media". But you can also look at it as "be authentic and help people". You probably have knowledge that others find very valuable. For my own product, I noticed that trying clever hacks is never that successful. Delivering proper value gets more and better responses. Looking backwards it always seems obvious "of course people prefer that". It's possible that twitter is not for…
I've usually corresponded with them before this happens of course, so maybe the part about finding a prospective user is actually me doing marketing. I want to make sure they are really interested and that they seem like they'd be patient and generous with good-quality feedback. And don't have a deadline, that practically goes without saying. A client like that is almost like your cofounder.
After product-meets-reality, I ask lots of questions, even about things I had already assumed. I even question the things that are seemingly working, to try to get from 'that part works great' to 'actually, now that you mentioned it, there might be a problem there.' It takes a lot of back-and-forth, so you are really risking annoyance, hence look for the right person.
I try to first pick out high-return changes I can do in a few weeks. I don't try to turn things faster than that in the beginning. I may have found a big problem in the design, a misunderstanding, a complete miss on something newly-obvious etc. A back-to-the-drawing board issue might take a lot longer. On something like that, having had someone working marketing earlier would no doubt have saved a lot of time.
I save by not paying someone, but I pay with a longer and less predictable development cycle. That trade-off works for me; might not for others. As well, since this is Hacker News, I should say that with outside investors they would no doubt prefer hiring professional marketing and sales folks.
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Engineers tend to have this conception of all salespeople (and, to the point of the GP, marketers) as con-artists: "how can I convince this rube to buy my crap?" When in reality, as you discovered, the best salespeople are the ones who are able to really, truly understand the problems of their customer base and help them find solutions. That is an incredibly special skill, and one that should never be underrated.
I guess the problem is that for every good salesman there's 10 conmen masquerading as good salesmen.
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Engineers tend to have this conception of all salespeople (and, to the point of the GP, marketers) as con-artists: "how can I convince this rube to buy my crap?" When in reality, as you discovered, the best salespeople are the ones who are able to really, truly understand the problems of their customer base and help them find solutions. That is an incredibly special skill, and one that should never be underrated.
I guess the problem is that for every good salesman there's 10 conmen masquerading as good salesmen.
I don't mean this in a mean way at all but when I read this my mind mostly goes to wondering if the energy spent on marketing and building yet another product we've seen thousands of iterations of would be better spent on trying to think of things that produce genuine value. (Another chart app? Again I don't mean to be insulting at all but it doesn't seem to solve much that hasn't been solved already.) Maybe engineer…
In my specific case, this has held true.
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> It's designed from the ground up for async collaboration and focus (you collaborate on decisions like you might an issue, rather than interruptive chat discussions or worse, meetings.) This doesn’t really tell me anything. Can you provide a real-world example of how it would work on a project? Is there a ~10 second video or gif of it in action? Or even more basic, what specifically made you angry enough with existi…
The app has a list of topics that anyone can add to. Each topic has a due date so you know when it is wrapping up, and they also have an explicit context and outcome; the topic creator sets the context, and the outcome is the bit that everyone collaborates on by editing together/using the discussion thread. Once the topic is done and a decision made, you lock the topic, saving the context, decision, and the discussio…
- I think I really like the idea but I didn’t see how you get from comments to a conclusion. Somebody reads the comments and edits the Description and Outcome fields? In which case, what does the audit trail look like?
- I get that you think this will reduce the need for meetings, but: 1) I think suggesting “no meetings” sounds faddish/unrealistic and 2) the calculator is cheesy, it’s both obviously not what real meetings cost and also accurate to the penny…
- In my last BigCorp job, the thing to sell against would be Slack and Jira, IMO the two worst technologies in most dev orgs today. Good that you mention them but maybe give some examples of why using AsyncGo is better, especially vs. Jira.
- The pricing seems a little odd. It seems like this would target remote startups but then maybe they never pay you (5 users free). But it’s not freemium because “all features unlocked.” And from 6-50 users it’s the same price. I’m no pricing expert but if I can’t see you you’d make money on me, I’d worry about committing to the product.
- We all want money but selling your consulting service in the same place as your product makes it look like you don’t believe in the product. And does anybody really hire this kind of consultant based on a website? Seems far fetched, I would stick to the product on the website.
- For many people lock-in is a dealbreaker especially if the company might not stick around. How do I get my data out?
- Browser extensions are nice but is it for all/most browsers?
- Update the Blog! I see this a lot: you start a blog because it seems like a good marketing trick then you don’t keep up with it. Post at least monthly, or take it down, because a stagnant blog implies a stagnant product, and here you have all these HN eyeballs ready to read your blog! Not every post has to be about the product directly, you can talk about adjacent things, blog about the tech stack, about remote work culture, etc.
Good luck with it! Again, I think I like the idea, it reminds me a bit of early Basecamp, but it could use some more explanation to get people to try it.
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There's no ad involved. It's just a product feed for Google Shopping that's auto-generated by Shopify, so the product details match the website always. Here's the store: https://ligninandlight.com/ Google's customer support just provides form responses linking to this policy my store violates: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6150127?hl=en But they won't provide any concrete information specific to my stor…
So, I looked at this and the only thing I can see is that the price doesn't update as you add options (larger size, engraving) etc., until you add to cart and then view the cart. So G may think that's misleading: It's not going to cost me $23 but $35. Your shop looks very nice, actually. Cool and thoughtful stuff.
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A high impact product doesn't necessarily mean a money maker. I'll never make a cent off https://concise-encoding.org but I'd certainly like it to become high impact and make everyones lives better! And that requires some good marketing, which unfortunately I'm only mediocre at.
Thanks for the self-promotion; this seems really neat and I might try my hand at a nim implementation.