Ask HN: How to find help marketing an MVP to programmers?

[sigre]

We're a small team of two programmers, and we've just launched our MVP (www.pushlayer.com, if you're interested). It's a service geared towards iOS developers, and we're looking for someone to help us out with the legwork of getting feedback to validate our concept.

We've been spreading the word ourselves, and tapping our own connections for feedback, but as our backlog grows, we'd love to get someone else involved to help us continue spreading the word.

Has anyone successfully found another person (even someone just helping out in their spare time) at this stage of their company? We're wary of any true "marketing" person, as we're really looking to reach out to fellow programmers.

Thanks for any and all advice!

[ig1]

I wouldn't at your stage, at such an early stage the founders need to be interacting with users, you'll lose too much (information) in communication overheads if you bring in someone to do it.

[orangethirty]

That's just bad business advice. You need to market right from the start. Having a dedicated person to do it is actually more productive than the founders themselves doing it.

[soneca]

Would be too shocking if I consider this a "How to find a non-technical co-founder" question?

Because I think that is just what you need. I don't think a freelance, temporary or part-time marketing person would be a good choice. A real co-founder, responsible for marketing your product would be ideal. Someone that could hack the distribution part of your product.

Actually, I don't have any practical tips of how to find this person, but my advice is that you should think of her as an essential part of the team, not a disposable labor with a specific mechanical job. Don't be the "code guy" versio of the HN stereotyped "idea guy".

Maybe something you could try is trying to find, on startups' events, that non-developer young guy, who is kind of lost there, not pitching any of his ideas, just trying to understand this environment and learn a few things. My guess is that this persona, with the right potential skills, could be a good distribution co-founder.

[sigre]

That's great advice, and perhaps that's really the answer. Based on what I've been directly observing, most of the "marketing" that I do is pretty mechanical: A/B testing, posting updates to our existing users and soliciting feedback, adwords experimenting, and writing blog posts and other content.

In terms of prioritization, spending my time improving the product and offloading this mechanical work just seems like the right thing to do.

[argonaut]

I disagree. That non-developer young guy has (as far as you are aware) the same, if not fewer, non-technical skills as the technical founders.

The only people worth bringing on board as non-technical founders are people you know personally, whose work you have seen yourself (and liked), and whose communication skills are a known quantity as well.

If you're going to bring on some random, you might as well do the distribution yourself.

[Kanbab]

I have a background in marketing/sales/adwords/social-media-hacking, and im finishing up a 3-month web-dev course. I guess you can say I will be able to speak the language of your target clients (i'll have to read through some objective-c tuts to really know what they struggle with).

What kind of work are you looking to get done specifically? Two things that I would do is: spend about 5 hours a week on Quora tapping iOS developers, spend about 5-10 hours a week on StackOverflow tapping iOS developers. All non-spammy.

Other things to do are: guest-blogging, requesting reviews.

Work requirements would include advanced analytics of incoming links to see how all of the off-site activity is performing.

[sharemywin]

I'm not sure I would get it out to more users, yet. If your still working out a large backlog of issues you may want to focus on the product. If you have a small but dedicated group of users, you might want to focus on making the product better until that users are refering others to the point its starting to grow on its own. Then, you know your product is ready for hockeystick growth.

[sigre]

Cool, and that's been our overarching strategy.

What I'm concerned about is that, as we work through the backlog of features, we also want to grow the users simultaneously. This will help us avoid a "bias of small numbers", in that our small group of initial users keep us focused most specifically on their needs, potentially taking us away from building features others might find compelling.

Hockeystick growth is for later, when we've achieved product-market fit. For now, I just want slow, linear growth to make sure we're consistently filling our backlog with compelling features that users actually want.

[vetleen]

Have you given any thought as to how you might grow later on, when you want to scale? I ask because this is a good opportunity for you to also test (“validate” as you put it) that part of your business concept.

[sigre]

Definitely. From a technical standpoint, it's Rails app on Heroku (using unicorn), using Sidekiq. I've got a ton of background with Rails and scaling on this platform, though not a lot with Sidekiq. I'm very excited about the possibilities with this though, and I've used redis quite a bit. On our backlog is to do some serious load testing. I'm also quite aware of the recent RapGenius/random routing stuff.

I'm planning to do a series of blog posts about how we built the site and some cool lessons we learned.

From a marketing perspective, the plan is to make an absolutely killer product that developers will enjoy using, and will tell anyone within earshot of it. We also have a couple of cool features that haven't been tried before with push notifications that I think will be intriguing enough to land us some general tech press. I don't have terribly specific scaling plans around marketing yet, as I don't want to put the cart before the horse (i.e. I want to prove there's a product-market fit first, then spend more effort on getting the word out.

[orangethirty]

In plain words, what does the product do for me?

[sigre]

It's an API you use to send push notifications to iOS devices that have your app installed.

More specifically: it (a) makes debugging missing notifications easier, as it often feels like a notification just disappears into the ether, (b) it's priced based on actual usage, and (c) it saves you a ton of time from having to deal with Apple's APNS, which in my experience can get quite hairy.

Based on our split testing and other feedback, one of the next items on our list is to rewrite the about page. Thanks for the feedback!

[markddotme]

Just sent you an email. Would be great to talk.