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Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
21–30 of 64 posts
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#22I absolutely hate hearing these things: Remember, ideas are worth nothing. And these days, even your code is worth very little. Alright, so creativity and idea-making worth nothing . Technical expertise to make it? nothing . Honestly, what's left? The business side of things? Maybe this article just bothered me because I was getting similar vibes to "you can just have an idea and hire some programming monkey to creat…
That's exactly right. Ideas aren't worth much. I like Siver's article on ideas as multipliers. Execution and the 'business side of things' as you stated are what matters. If Zuckerberg didn't execute like he did with Facebook, Facebook would've still have been a cute little toy project at Harvard. The idea of Facebook itself is pretty simplistic.
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#23A reason not to start marketing right away:
- You may pick the wrong people to market to and they convince you to abandon your project
While this may save you some time, the people may just have convinced you to stop work on a valuable product.
Even though I've done a couple projects that haven't gone anywhere, the fact that I have completed them in a working and useful state has greatly helped me get interviews and led to higher paying work.
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#24After reading Zed Shaw's post yesterday about how "Long Beards" are getting marginalized by "Product Guys" I cringe when I hear bullshit like this: Ideas (and in most cases even the code itself) is worth little. It’s marketing that makes the startup. (Mind you, ideas are worth little, but the rest... yeah)
Ideas (and in most cases even the code itself) is worth little. It’s marketing that makes the startup.
But it does have some truth to it.
You can write great code and still not get customers without _some_ good marketing. And on the opposite many mediocre products can thrive with great marketing.
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#25Once this is setup the major task is driving traffic, which is far beyond the scope of this article.
Yes, and it's the hardest part of the process. Saying "start early" doesn't help much if you punt on "start what?" Glossing over that 650 strong list is skipping the meat of the subject. How much did they cost, where did they come from, and how long did they take to get? Those are the questions worth answering. You need to answer (or guess at) those questions before you decide when to start your marketing.
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#26I absolutely hate hearing these things: Remember, ideas are worth nothing. And these days, even your code is worth very little. Alright, so creativity and idea-making worth nothing . Technical expertise to make it? nothing . Honestly, what's left? The business side of things? Maybe this article just bothered me because I was getting similar vibes to "you can just have an idea and hire some programming monkey to creat…
That's exactly right. Ideas aren't worth much. I like Siver's article on ideas as multipliers. Execution and the 'business side of things' as you stated are what matters. If Zuckerberg didn't execute like he did with Facebook, Facebook would've still have been a cute little toy project at Harvard. The idea of Facebook itself is pretty simplistic.
He was also lucky, in the right place and time, and savvy enough to exploit his luck. Plus, the value of Facebook (and other sites mentioned) is the community and mindshare. You can't just buy a Facebook clone and expect overnight success.
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#27"No, these days even technical execution is mostly trivial (with a few exceptions for apps built around unique algorithms). Far more important is marketing execution." Can someone please smack this idiot?
He's right. How many people have failed to launch a product because they couldn't figure out how to do it? How many have failed because nobody wanted it? You can buy technical execution with little risk. Not so for marketing execution.
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#28Once this is setup the major task is driving traffic, which is far beyond the scope of this article. Yes, and it's the hardest part of the process. Saying "start early" doesn't help much if you punt on "start what?" Glossing over that 650 strong list is skipping the meat of the subject. How much did they cost, where did they come from, and how long did they take to get? Those are the questions worth answering. You ne…
First off, the article is "Why" to do this, not "how to market a startup." I named it this way for a reason; marketing is a huge topic. I devote an entire chapter to it in my book, and am tossing around the idea of writing an entire book on the subject.
So offering the how and why in a blog post is a bit more than you should expect.
And there is value in saying "start early." Most devs I know don't do this and it costs them when they launch. If you've heard it and already know this that's fine, but many others have not.
With that said, here are quick answers to your questions:
>>How much did they cost
Typically nothing.
>>Where did they come from
It depends on your niche, but typically from being involved in that niche's community, publishing blog posts that get mentioned on Twitter, being interviewed on podcasts, and generally getting in front of the audience who will buy your application.
At a 50% conversion rate you only need 1300 uniques for a 650 person list.
>>How long did they take to get?
Most often 4-6 months. Most first-time startup founders can drive 1300 targeted uniques to a landing page in 4-6 months.
For more on this topic keep your eyes on the blog; I'll be posting more about this kind of stuff over the next few months.
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#29I'm ambivalent about this. Having been through a few different startups with various degrees of marketing, it seems like the issue is really sensitive to your product and your schedule.
Mog.com started out with minimal hype despite a lot of effort by its CEO, and had an very (almost disastrously) slow startup phase. When we ran into implementation difficulties we compounded this slow-start problem even more. Mog managed to pull through this because of prudent financials and perseverance, but it was a near thing.
Powerset had the opposite problem, we had so much hype we didn't know what to do with it. What Powerset delivered was pretty impressive, but much less than what people expected. Cries of "Deeply Disappointed!" rained down on us like drops of acid, and we were powerless to do anything but deliver on what we could and say the rest was either too expensive or too difficult for the moment. But we did have a lot of users and interest, so we had a huge launch.
Now I'm at BankSimple, which is somewhere in between these other plans. BankSimple is aggressively talking to people and getting their message out, so there is some pent-up demand. We're also very diligent about responding to people as people, we do a bit of research before replying to (almost every) email. This means that we get some impatient tweets and messages (“Who cares what you look like? Where is your service?!”) asking for unreasonably fast development time, but it also means we get a lot of insightful feedback and commentary.
Our biggest obstacle seems to be controlling the hype. It's very easy for people to build up what we promised into veiled hints some kind of complete reform of the US financial system, which is probably an unreasonable launch goal. ;)
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#30After reading Zed Shaw's post yesterday about how "Long Beards" are getting marginalized by "Product Guys" I cringe when I hear bullshit like this: Ideas (and in most cases even the code itself) is worth little. It’s marketing that makes the startup. (Mind you, ideas are worth little, but the rest... yeah)
Don't take this the wrong way, but why did it take a Zed rant to see through this? Usually "department x is more important than anyone else" arguments are flawed to begin with.
You're right; it didn't take Zed to convince me, I just thought it was odd that I read two articles arguing about the same thing on vastly different ends of the spectrum.