Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by stener » Fri, Oct 15, 2010, 8:32 AM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #42

zeemonkee wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This attitude bugs me a lot. There is probably a path for every single person in this country to make a million dollars in the next year if they were just "savvy enough" to take advantage of it. It seems everyone wants to diminish Zuck's success by ascribing luck to it, but let me tell you something. Zuck executed the shit out of Facebook. Did the community and mindshare just come out of thin air? There's no good rea…

The time when it was possible to build simple application with good design and get tons of users is over. Today, a lot of people can do what the pioneers have done and get 0 users. I don't say it's impossible to get so many users as FB, but it's much harder. So Zuck was lucky to have the right solution in the right time. The bar for Zuck of today is much higher, simply because they aren't so "lucky" to live in the wild beginning of computer/ internet era.

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

#62

Post by ecaradec » Fri, Oct 15, 2010, 3:19 PM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #51

zeemonkee wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying his success was due purely to luck, but that luck was a major factor. Being the right place and right time is a huge part of it. He was the right age, in the right environment, when the right technology reached the right tipping point and critical mass. I'm not disparaging Zuckerberg's ability or hard work. However many with greater ability and who have worked harder have failed because of circumstance…

But isn't it just a platitude you tell yourself to feel better that you will never be that successful? How can you be sure Zuck isn't better than those who failed? And how can you be sure those who failed didn't do something wrong? You see how pointless this is?

Luck plays a role in building a billion dollars company, otherwise billg, stevej, would be building billion dollars company every 10 years which is not happening.

Building a million dollars company is hard work (I mean 10 million at least ), but still billion dollars company are mostly about being lucky and exploiting it. I doubt that billionnaire entrepreneurs seriously worked much more, or much smarter than millionnaires. Billionaire companies landed there because they exploited ideas inherently more monopolistic, more able to spread.

If you take the sivers multiplier http://sivers.org/multiply, ideas still have some potential : a x20 multiplier is a huge boost.

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

#63

Post by dasil003 » Fri, Oct 15, 2010, 4:16 PM UTC

ecaradec wrote: post #62

dasil003 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't it just a platitude you tell yourself to feel better that you will never be that successful? How can you be sure Zuck isn't better than those who failed? And how can you be sure those who failed didn't do something wrong? You see how pointless this is?

Luck plays a role in building a billion dollars company, otherwise billg, stevej, would be building billion dollars company every 10 years which is not happening. Building a million dollars company is hard work (I mean 10 million at least ), but still billion dollars company are mostly about being lucky and exploiting it. I doubt that billionnaire entrepreneurs seriously worked much more, or much smarter than million…

sigh thank you for totally missing the point. This is all mental masturbation. You're just using luck as a synonym for circumstance, which is not a good attitude for an aspiring entrepreneur to take.

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

#64

Post by bqn » Fri, Oct 15, 2010, 4:21 PM UTC

rwalling wrote: post #38

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?"

I guess the customers might think different when they actually see the product.