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Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

softwarebyrob.com

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Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#31

Post by punnned »

"Ideas are worth nothing" - it's a big statement and quite a prevalent view these days.

I think it's true to an extent - a successful startup doesn't need an entirely new, innovative idea but at the same time a new, innovative idea doesn't necessarily result in a successful startup. I think what's more important is not the idea itself, but the angle you take to market your idea. And that is why the blog post has some sound advice.

For example, facebook wasn't the first social network but the way it marketed itself (ie exclusively to college students ) etc was quite effective. Google wasn't the first search engine but its 'clean, simple' branding was quite unique.

Your marketing strategy/approach shapes the design and the features of your product.

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#32

Post by zacharycohn »

KirinDave wrote: post #29

I'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 mana…

As someone who signed up for BankSimple around the time the first wave of press was going out, I can say that I probably check your blog once a week, and have sent your site to countless of my friends. (I'm trying to be patient, but it's hard. :)) I think it's a great example of why marketing early (with the right message) can be super useful.

One thing that the article didn't go into was getting people familiar with you. Even if someone doesn't sign up (or if you don't have a way for them to give you their email address for some reason), if someone stumbles across your site/product a few times before it launches, they're likely to start to remember it and be more interested when it launches.

(KirinDave- Keep up the good work! I'm excited to hear back from you guys and start using whatever you guys give us.)

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#33

Post by zacharycohn »

j_baker wrote: post #16
nihilocrat wrote: post #10

After 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.

When he says "ideas/technical expertise are worth nothing," I think it might be meant to drive people who are obsessed about ideas/technical implementation toward the middle where things are more balanced, more so than it is to drive them too far to the "marketing is everything" side.

I agree though, saying "X is >> important than Y" tends to not be a great plan.

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#34

Post by zacharycohn »

wccrawford wrote: post #3

Reason #3: The boy who cried vaporware. If you end up with a history of advertising vaporware, nobody will listen when you finally get it right. If you are super amazing and you can get your first product to market, this obviously doesn't apply. But most people aren't. And most of those who do, they're just lucky. Reason #4: Duke Nukem Forever will be out any day now. If you take too long to get it to market, your pr…

I have a half-joking pet theory that Duke Nukem Forever is the greatest marketing ploy of all time. Their plan was to announce this game, do enough development to release a teaser every 5 years or so, and then wait until 2008 to REALLY start development of it.

Greatest hype machine ever, and never doubt the Duke..

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#35

Post by yan »

I think this is awful from the standpoint of morale (coming from personal experience). If you start marketing, and start getting positive feedback way too early, you end up cashing in the rewards a bit too early. Early positive feedback from friends killed many personal projects since I got the praise before I did anything and lost motivation to actually finish them.

YMMV, but this is how I react.

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#37

Post by rwalling »

kloncks wrote: post #19

I 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…

You realize the statements you've quoted are a 3-sentence tangent that has nothing to do with the point of the article, right? There's another 1500+ words that don't rely on this being true or not.

Secondly, I didn't say technical expertise is worth "nothing." Of course it's worth something. But as developers, we need to realize that, except in rare exceptions, our code is worth a lot less than we think it is.

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#38

Post by rwalling »

mattm wrote: post #23

A 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…

Isn't that like saying "Don't try to find any potential customers for your idea because they may not like it and you may give up?"

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#39

Post by metamemetics »

kloncks wrote: post #19

I 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…

One supporting example for the article's position is Mint.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1791278 (How Mint beat Wesabe from Mint's point of view)

> We spent a ton of time holding online chats, went to events (like twiistup la, finnovate) and connected with the entire personal finance community. Oh yea, this was 9 months before we even launched the product.

Think about this. By the time Mint launched we had more traffic than all the other personal finance sites (buxfer, geezeo, wesabe) combined.

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#40

Post by jdp23 »

hopeless wrote: post #13
grammaton wrote: post #8

"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?

I think in the context of "which is harder, building the product or building the market?" most programmers will admit that the coding is (almost) trivially easy compared to actually getting users. Perhaps trivial is too harsh a word but I understand what he means.

agreed. "trivial" is an overstatement but the essence of what he's saying is completely right.
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