Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing • Hacker News Board

Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing

#111

Post by brandoncarl » Thu, Nov 07, 2013, 12:22 PM UTC

Basil - beautiful aesthetic. A few thoughts for you:

1. You are currently marketing the features of your application. Consider instead marketing the problem that you're solving. Demonstrate that you understand the problem and then show why Bee is the solution to it.

2. Which value proposition are you competing on? Clayton Christensen suggests that often markets move through functionality, reliability, convenience, and price. For software professionals, that probably looks like functionality, usability, reliability, convenience, and price.

3. As a gut reaction, your price to feature set seems off. How did you originally come up with the price? It's one of the hardest and most difficult things. If I were you, I'd set up an intro price of $19 while you're on HN front page, and advertise that right on the landing page.

Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing

#112

Post by Toenex » Thu, Nov 07, 2013, 12:25 PM UTC

kennethtilton wrote: post #98

vertis wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm vegetarian, but bacon still smells good.

Mmmm, bacon! I am a vegetarian and thank God that bacon is the only flavor that can be faked well.

If it helps, you just keep believing that.

Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing

#113

Post by lotsofcows » Thu, Nov 07, 2013, 12:32 PM UTC

nikatwork wrote: post #85

vertis wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Mmmmm, gamey. Makes me think of well hung duck.

Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing

#114

Post by tpsc » Thu, Nov 07, 2013, 12:50 PM UTC

markbao wrote: post #9

Nice 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…

Great landing page, although it would be handy to be able to replay the video. There is a lot happening there and I didn't catch everything at first.

Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing

#115

Post by kreilly » Thu, Nov 07, 2013, 1:56 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #92

ekianjo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just one thing I wanted to add. If anyone has a startup idea "Marketing as a Service", HN is probably a good place to start your service since we see this as a regular need: people making applications they have no clue how to market. There's probably a ton of unmet needs in this field.

Marketing as a service has been around for years. They are called Ad Agencies.

Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing

#116

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 07, 2013, 2:08 PM UTC

zaidf wrote: post #90

ekianjo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing

#117

Post by ericd » Thu, Nov 07, 2013, 2:21 PM UTC

nikatwork wrote: post #103

ericd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it's not - it's well preserved, and not decomposing in the way that a rotting corpse would be.

It's still a decomposing dead animal, preservation just slows down the process. If you don't believe me, leave a pack of bacon in your fridge for two months then take a big sniff. Of course, picked vegetables are also decomposing at a certain rate - but they don't have a dead animal smell. This is also why I'm excited about Soylent, and I haven't seen them play up the sustainable/ethical angle as yet.

You and I are also decomposing, I wouldn't say we smell like decomposing animal. The rate of decomposition changes the dominant smell, so it's not really valid to say that bacon smells like decomposing dead animal, because it smells much more like other things.

Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing

#118

Post by ekianjo » Thu, Nov 07, 2013, 2:38 PM UTC

kreilly wrote: post #115

ekianjo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just one thing I wanted to add. If anyone has a startup idea "Marketing as a Service", HN is probably a good place to start your service since we see this as a regular need: people making applications they have no clue how to market. There's probably a ton of unmet needs in this field.

Marketing as a service has been around for years. They are called Ad Agencies.

That's not really what I meant. Ad agencies only do a very tiny part of what I call Marketing. If you think that's only it, you are reducing Marketing to a very small chunk of what it actually is.

Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing

#119

Post by nikatwork » Thu, Nov 07, 2013, 2:39 PM UTC

ericd wrote: post #117

nikatwork wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still a decomposing dead animal, preservation just slows down the process. If you don't believe me, leave a pack of bacon in your fridge for two months then take a big sniff. Of course, picked vegetables are also decomposing at a certain rate - but they don't have a dead animal smell. This is also why I'm excited about Soylent, and I haven't seen them play up the sustainable/ethical angle as yet.

You and I are also decomposing, I wouldn't say we smell like decomposing animal. The rate of decomposition changes the dominant smell, so it's not really valid to say that bacon smells like decomposing dead animal, because it smells much more like other things.

Unless you're a zombie, you are not decomposing, you're aging[1]. I'm afraid there's a rather sharp binary distinction between alive and dead. I suppose one could argue that the pigs confined within a factory farm never really get to live.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decomposition

Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing

#120

Post by strikespeed » Thu, Nov 07, 2013, 2:42 PM UTC

What most programmers/writers/innovators often forget is that unless they spend time/effort and money on getting the word out about their products, the world will never see it. It surprises me how often I come across people that believe their product "will sell itself" and totally ignore marketing. Computers world wide are filled with great projects that not more then a handful of people will see. Whatever your idea is, make sure to spend as much time as you spend creating it, thinking and planning out your marketing of same product. Without it, your idea will still be "the best in the world" but nobody will ever know about it.