How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget • Hacker News Board

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#41

Post by gist » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 9:13 PM UTC

> Seth has published 18 books and is regarded as one the best marketing minds alongside Ogilvy or Tim Ferris, so he doesn't need to be in the trenches anymore.

I hate statements like this ie 'best marketing minds alongside Ogilvy..'.

Who considers Seth equivalent of David Ogilvy or anything close? That's really quite ridiculous actually.

Oh yeah and Tim Ferris is certainly no Ogilvy either.

Ogilvy built a world renown career in advertising. Seth wrote books and started a small company that doesn't even exist anymore. He may have some good things to say but he is certainly not in the league of a David Ogilvy.

Lastly ideas and 'how I'd do it' don't matter as everyone knows. You can have tons of ideas a new idea everyday. Not even trying to implement the idea and just being interviewed about it is like hypothesizing how you'd pick someone up in a bar or win the Olympics.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#42

Post by gist » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 9:16 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #24

Seth Godin is a marketer and talented self-promoter. His job (which he does well) is to write pithy stuff that captures your attention. This is an agency problem with a lot of business advice. The people who really know how to launch a business on $1K are almost never the ones writing about how to do it.

This is exactly true. His super skill is self promoting and capturing attention. He has definitely done well at that. And sure it's possible that he could start a business on $1000 but quite honestly I am not sure that is even a good yardstick anyway. A good business could take much more to start and in business you wouldn't never arbitrarily limit yourself in that way anyway.

Not sour grapes either. I started a business years ago with roughly $2000 (let's say it's $6k in today's dollars) that I had saved up. Made money, sold it and it's still operating to this day many years later.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#43

Post by a-saleh » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 9:16 PM UTC

glibgil wrote: post #3

A better guide would be how to launch a business on a budget of 45 minutes a day. I'm sure that's the bigger challenge for most of us

Unfortunately I realised that my brain just doesn't work that way. It seems that for any meaningful, productive work I need at least hour and half. On smaller budget I can only do chores, i.e. pay an invoice or answer a trivial email.

As if there was some weird rule stating "if you can't complete a thing in 15 mins, it will take you at least an hour"

For harder work, I need 3 hours and quiet. 4 hours seem to be the most efficient time chunk anyway, and after that it starts sharply falling (usually there is little difference if I work for 6 or 10 hours straight)

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#44

Post by jacobevelyn » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 9:30 PM UTC

a-saleh wrote: post #43

glibgil wrote: post #3

A better guide would be how to launch a business on a budget of 45 minutes a day. I'm sure that's the bigger challenge for most of us

Unfortunately I realised that my brain just doesn't work that way. It seems that for any meaningful, productive work I need at least hour and half. On smaller budget I can only do chores, i.e. pay an invoice or answer a trivial email. As if there was some weird rule stating "if you can't complete a thing in 15 mins, it will take you at least an hour" For harder work, I need 3 hours and quiet. 4 hours seem to be the m…

I am exactly the same.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#45

Post by jaf656s » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 9:35 PM UTC

WA wrote: post #26

wheresvic1 wrote: post #10

I'm actually wondering how to market the medium post that I wrote that delivers value - seems a bit of chicken and the egg problem.

Exactly this. Same as "build a side project as a marketing channel for your main thing" – as if that side project markets itself. People seem to assume just because something is free, it automatically reaches a big audience.

In the actual interview, he says the only way to really learn marketing is to market something.

So write the medium article and try different ways to get people to read it.

Most people don't know how to do the latter and give up before even starting.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#46

Post by Heraclite » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 10:32 PM UTC

I really enjoyed this article. Any news aggregator where I can find similar articles? (HN for marketing?)

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#47

Post by jim_d » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 10:59 PM UTC

DizzyDoo wrote: post #11

I started my business with less than $1000. I worked a full-time job and built my first video game product ( http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900/The_Cat_Machine/ ) by waking up earlier in the morning to get an hour or two in before my 'real' job, and working Saturdays, and doing that for a year. I found customers by putting an enormous about of effort into marketing, and finding only some of it paid off (but wha…

what marketing did you try and what did you find really worked?

I've got a side project that I'll hopefully be launching this month and I would love some tips.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#48

Post by raldu » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 11:32 PM UTC

kevmo wrote: post #5

"We, marketers, are selfish, lying, short-term thinking scum. We believe that our job is to manipulate people as we market to them." The book Propaganda by Edward Bernays is an excellent read about how to think long-term about marketing. Define your ultimate goals -> dial out several levels and think about what conditions drive people to participate in those goals -> work to create those conditions. Interesting to th…

Propaganda is the exact opposite of what digital marketing is about.

In fact, the provided quote from the article is supposed to highlight that the "time for propaganda is over" in an ironical way.

Propaganda is the way of the TV, shouting, manipulation, disruption, etc.

Focusing on a defined audience, on the other hand, is the way of the "new" marketing that Godin (an the article) talks about.

Therefore attempting to think about "the tiniest audience" in conjunction with "propaganda" terms is going to be unproductive; because in propaganda, "everybody" is your audience, not a defined segment.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#49

Post by devrandomguy » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 11:35 PM UTC

imarg wrote: post #40

1337biz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the job but finding the right people to outsource to seems sometimes more work than actually doing the project myself.

You are probably right. I must admit that I have actually never outsourced anything. But it seems to me this is the way to go. Maybe the problem of finding the right people to outsource to, is actually a business idea? Not like the existing sites like odesk (they are called upwork now?) are providing but something like a curated list of people of various disciplines to outsource to?

Might be worth checking out the various issue-bounty setups, like Bountysource. Focus on documenting the design of your MVP in a public Git repo, then file issues with a bounty on them to get tasks done. As soon as you have something working, you can "Show HN" for a blast of dev publicity. If you are looking for small scale funding, without getting into a VC situation, then you could encourage supporters / users to contribute on issues that they personally care about.

This sort of requires you to open-source your project, but maybe you can isolate the secret sauce in one tiny little backend service? Or, maybe the true value of your startup isn't in the source code, but rather in relationships with / between users, in which case you don't really need to worry about someone scooping your work with a simple `git clone`.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#50

Post by mikekchar » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 11:51 PM UTC

a-saleh wrote: post #43

glibgil wrote: post #3

A better guide would be how to launch a business on a budget of 45 minutes a day. I'm sure that's the bigger challenge for most of us

Unfortunately I realised that my brain just doesn't work that way. It seems that for any meaningful, productive work I need at least hour and half. On smaller budget I can only do chores, i.e. pay an invoice or answer a trivial email. As if there was some weird rule stating "if you can't complete a thing in 15 mins, it will take you at least an hour" For harder work, I need 3 hours and quiet. 4 hours seem to be the m…

I think it's a matter of practice. I experimented with trying to do a long kata (the old Core Wars game) one pomodoro a day [0]. I didn't finish it, but I managed 66 pomodoros. I kept a detailed TODO list and I was really surprised that I could maintain a fairly decent pace. The link has Asciinema videos of every Pomodoro I did. It's painfully slow watching me type, but if you use the ">" key, you can speed up the video (3-4 times seems about right).

At the beginning I had difficulty getting much done, but by the end it only took me about a minute to get into the zone. I think the other main problem I had (which culminated in me not continuing) is maintaining a regular schedule. 1 pomodoro a day doesn't seem that hard to do, but sustaining the pace over the long term was pretty difficult. I ended up skipping lots of days (sometimes going a week between pomodoros) and finally gave up. One of these days I'll learn how to overcome that problem :-)

[0] - http://mikekchar.github.io/core-wars-kata/