so if nothing work out. blog about it and submit it to HN about your failure and hurray you are a success :)
Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
81–90 of 152 posts
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#82"So now after years of neglecting anything to do with marketing. I get it. Marketing is hard. So crushingly hard.Also I was incredibly naive in thinking that the product was so good that the marketing would just snowball itself into action" This right here ... a 1000 times. I've been a developer for years now and I always held onto the same fantasy of launching something so good that marketing would take care of itse…
I,oddly enough, had the opposite. Gave my software out to a few friends (wrote it for myself, as the others in its class sucked), Next thing I know I'm getting 100k d/l a month (paying for overages, fun) - and soon after have a few million users. Never have spent any money on advertising (even though the software DID make it on to a TV show in Denmark a few years later - and magazines, newspapers, etc.) Still getting…
The Software was "StationRipper" (still IS StationRipper - first released in 2003. Holy crap, Dec 13 2003!?!?!!??!!? I'm glad I posted this, I had no idea it was almost the 10th anniversary!!!)
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#83"So now after years of neglecting anything to do with marketing. I get it. Marketing is hard. So crushingly hard.Also I was incredibly naive in thinking that the product was so good that the marketing would just snowball itself into action" This right here ... a 1000 times. I've been a developer for years now and I always held onto the same fantasy of launching something so good that marketing would take care of itse…
I'm currently in between a programmer and a marketing guy in a specific niche. My interpretation is slightly different:
With software, you can find a way to get it to work. Given the right knowledge, you can accomplish your goal. (Assuming a goal that other people of similar skill have achieved it, and not proving P=NP type stuff.)
With marketing, even if you do everything "right", there's still a huge chance at failure. Being experienced, knowledgeable, and focused doesn't mean you'll accomplish what you set out to do.
I think it's related to the fact that you control software when you write code. Marketing has so much outside of your control that even doing everything right still only results in a < 100% success rate.
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few notes... Marketing for large enterprises is a different challenge than promoting a product on your own, so insights from working at SUN might not translate into street level marketing. 1) marketing is not sales - This is absolutely incorrect. Marketing is any communication that touches a prospect or customer. Copywriting is salesmanship in print. Sales is absolutely a key ingredient of marketing! 2) Marketing i…
To be fair, at the time Sun had exactly 4 products, the Sun 3/50, the Sun 3/75, the Sun 3/160, and the Sun 3/280. But you are absolutely correct that Enterprise marketing is different than start up marketing. I was fortunate to be at Sun through the transition. We'll have to disagree on your characterization of Marketing as Sales, I see them as two very different types of communications. That said, I know people who…
Marketing is about matching up the right message to the right market through the right media...
Sales is a marketing tactic. The salesman is the media, the sales pitch is the message, and the prospect is the market...
The pitch and process might be different, but thats because its a different form of marketing than print or tv or internet,etc...
But... your sales team should be under the umbrella of your marketing department... otherwise you will have the classic conflict of bad leads vs. bad salesman, a classic environment where people can easily shirk responsibility and shift blame instead of recognizing that they are all part of the same process.
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#85Nice. So one of the things that happened to me when I came to the Bay Area was I was working at Intel and I had to talk to a lot of marketing folks (who were talking to 'the public' about Intel's chips). I realized I didn't have a clue what they did. I set out to correct that before I started my own company and looked for a job that would let me work closely with marketing but still be engineering based. I found one…
I'm vegetarian, but bacon still smells good.
This is going to sound sanctimonious, but I'm vegetarian and to me bacon smells like rotting corpse (because that's what it is).
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#86Coincidentally just the other week I got stuck using Jira and it's abysmally slow/buggy interface.
FWIW I was very excited to see Bee but haven't done the work to setup a password for my account on our Jira ondemand instance.
I wonder if some of the slower adoption for you has been people like me using a google account to log into Jira and simply not having a real Jira credentials.
I'll get around to it but I suspect I'm not the only one that didn't feel like mucking around in the Jira account settings to setup credentials for Bee to connect with.
I assume there's no way to access the Jira API otherwise?
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, at the time Sun had exactly 4 products, the Sun 3/50, the Sun 3/75, the Sun 3/160, and the Sun 3/280. But you are absolutely correct that Enterprise marketing is different than start up marketing. I was fortunate to be at Sun through the transition. We'll have to disagree on your characterization of Marketing as Sales, I see them as two very different types of communications. That said, I know people who…
Marketing is about matching up the right message to the right market through the right media... Sales is a marketing tactic. The salesman is the media, the sales pitch is the message, and the prospect is the market... The pitch and process might be different, but thats because its a different form of marketing than print or tv or internet,etc... But... your sales team should be under the umbrella of your marketing de…
Wow... this was truly a great, insightful post. I definitely learned something.
Thank you sir. Added your blog to my bookmarks.
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#88Don't just "try AdWords", "try social", "try inbound marketing" or any of those things you think you're just supposed to do for some reason. Think of a strategy and then come up with an offer that presents a compelling value proposition. How will you show your product to your customers before they decide to buy? Who are you customers anyways? Come up with a few customer profiles.
One you figure these things out, creating campaigns that accomplish your marketing objectives will be more natural and less like a stab in the dark.
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#89Nice work. I've also recently released my first Mac app [0] and I'm working on getting the word out about it by making it free, the idea being that if it's known by people, it can be spread through word-of-mouth, especially if it becomes indispensable. GitHub's API currently reports 600 users, and I'm working on increasing that to 1000 before making it a paid app and marketing it. Nice to see both approaches here; I…
looks great! Love the simplicity of the landing page too. Though I'm a little unsure why you have the reddit page in your video? Did you mean that with your tool, you'd save lots of time (to waste?). I personally find it distracting and misleading.
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#90Nice. So one of the things that happened to me when I came to the Bay Area was I was working at Intel and I had to talk to a lot of marketing folks (who were talking to 'the public' about Intel's chips). I realized I didn't have a clue what they did. I set out to correct that before I started my own company and looked for a job that would let me work closely with marketing but still be engineering based. I found one…
I'd add that Marketing is about value creation ultimately. You have to start with the right mindset, i.e. that you product has no value per se, and that marketing is everything you are going to do around your product/service to create the perception of its value. Your customers don't know how time you spent on it, they don't care how complex it is, they don't even want to know how it works (at least not until they ar…
We operate with this mindset for each of the roles in our org:
Sales: assume the product sucks and your job is to convince customers to buy a really shitty product
Product: assume that there is no sales and your job is to create a product that people cannot stop raving about after using it for few minutes
Client Services: assume the product sucks and your job is to still keep the customer satisfied