51–60 of 152 posts
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I don't mean to reply with just a me too - but, absolutely agree with you through my own spend a year developing a product I can't market experiences... Software Development = Easy Marketing that Software = Wicked Hard
Software Development = Easy This is only true because most people are building fairly trivial software.
"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…
Have also written tons of other stuff that this did NOT happen to :)
Nice. 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…
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…
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 flip back and forth between the two, and people who are really stuck in one side or the other.
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Another Sun story. I was at the annual Sun employee conference way back in 2002. As engineers, we were raving about Java/Swing & the JDK. After a while, one of the audience members couldn't take it anymore & spoke up loudly - "WTF is Java ? It has never made a dime. We sell boxes. That's what makes money. We should be talking about that!" He was a marketing guy for the Sparc workstations that was Sun's bread & butter…
Perhaps you can clue me in: What was Sun's plan with Java? For a company that sold hardware, making a runtime that works everywhere, and has cross-platformness as a core feature seems sort of counterproductive. Did Sparc offer some sort of competitive advantage, hardware wise (like hardware assisted GC) or something? Edit: In Microsoft's case with the CLR, I can see the cross-platform goals being mainly technical, bu…
Once it was being seen as the "death" of Microsoft, taking away the desktop monopoly and moving it into the browser. Well then it became a hammer to beat upon the enemy, and beat they did.
That it was effective against Microsoft ensured it would get funding and support, it also prevented some really useful things from coming to market from Sun at least (like a native compiler, ala gcj, in which to build Java 'binaries')
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Another Sun story. I was at the annual Sun employee conference way back in 2002. As engineers, we were raving about Java/Swing & the JDK. After a while, one of the audience members couldn't take it anymore & spoke up loudly - "WTF is Java ? It has never made a dime. We sell boxes. That's what makes money. We should be talking about that!" He was a marketing guy for the Sparc workstations that was Sun's bread & butter…
Relatedly, I was at sun in 2002 and went to one of the town halls that Johnathan Schwartz was doing in menlo park. Someone asked how we would make money from {thing} and he was told by Mr. Shwartz that engineers shouldn't worry about how to make money from things, they should focus on the code. One of the many reasons our stock price went from $80 to $2 methinks...
Nice. 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…
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Software Development = Easy This is only true because most people are building fairly trivial software.
Fairly trivial software sells too, my friend.
But that doesn't mean we should make blanket statements that building software is easy. Because it's only easy if the problem you're trying to solve is easy.
Nice! Great to read your experience from creating a product to launching it. Also glad to win over another developer to not thinking that all marketing is BS ;-) Some tips from a marketer: +Get analytics set up! I see that you've only mentioned the top of the funnel (traffic) and the bottom of the funnel (downloads). I'm assuming you don't have tracking for the full flow (traffic > install > activation > day 1-30 ret…
- reddit can be a goldmine of traffic because it has so many subreddits that one is bound to cover your niche (IF you have a really niche product)
- have a blog, then write interesting things that may not necessarily have to do with your product in a direct way 42floors.com is a good example to follow.
- optimize said blog for SEO
- make sure you get email addresses from prospects that land on your site and use them, email marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing software ... go here for how http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/31/can-i-get-your-email/
- make sure you have at least a twitter account and if you have the time, fish for people that could be interested in your product by finding tweets about competitors, or hashtags related to your product. engage these tweeters.
etc etc ad nauseam
I'd make the starfield extend further down the page, past the first screenshot. Then I would somehow frame the other sections of the page. Maybe by adding an interior border or some sort of texture.
Marketing is a cousin of visual design.