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Ask HN: Love building Products, hate Marketing. Am I doomed?

4 points| ProductBuilder | 11 years ago | reply

I love coding and I love building products.

The usual story seems to be: Build your product and while you build it, write about it in a blog. Have a Twitter profile and a Facebook page. Get in contact with bloggers and the relevant reporters. Or maybe not. Im not sure I understand this game. And I really don't like the idea of doing this. And I really suck at social things.

My product however is really good. No, really. People find it really useful. It has 200 visitors a day. Out of nowhere. I did no marketing at all. It's not listed in any search engine. People twitter about it and share it on Facebook.

Any tips? How would you guys go about it? Can one outsource the PR part of a startup?

11 comments

[+] webstartupper|11 years ago|reply

Ideally get a co-founder who is interested in marketing your product. However, if you are single founder like me then technically you could outsource marketing if you have already achieved a product-market fit. These are the steps I would follow before I outsource marketing. (these are very generic steps since there is no information on your product)

1. Find out who my target customer and whether my product solve his problem. This would be done by reaching out to those customers/users who regularly use my product. Depending on customer/product/market this could involve speaking to them on the phone, sending a simple personalized email or an online survey.

2. If I know where my target customers hangs out, I would try to figure out if there is a scalable way to reach out to them. Hopefully there will be multiple channels I could use. I would ideally test these channels to see what kind of conversions I get and at what price. (still just gathering data and not scaling up)

3. At this time, I would look at "retention rate" as the preferred metric to obsess over. "No of visitors per day" tends to be a vanity metric. I would also look at testing out different copy on my landing page to see whether the value proposition resonates well with the target audience (and converts well). Generally the copy wording comes from step 1 - but gets validated with step 3.

Hopefully at the end of step 3 I have a better product-market fit. Targeted users are entering my funnel and with enough retention (and hopefully revenue). This would be a good point to outsource marketing, since you can measure how effective the marketer is.

If all of the above sounds like something you absolutely loathe to do (and that's natural for a lot of devs), then I think the only option is to get a marketing co-founder involved right from the start.

[+] ProductBuilder|11 years ago|reply

This seems a misunderstanding. I do not sell anything. It's an informational website. A tool. More like Google then like Amazon.

[+] kimura|11 years ago|reply

You are only doomed if you believe that you are doomed. Go out there and grind! Given that grinding is not your cup of tea, your only option is to pay someone to grind for you. Good luck with your product.

[+] saluki|11 years ago|reply

You have the hard part down . . . building something that gives users values . . .

Are these paying users? (Just curious).

You can definitely outsource the creation of your twitter profile page and fbook page . . . and pay to have some decent articles written for your website to gain more organic traffic.

I'd recommend listening to StartUpsForTheRestOfUs.com they have some great podcasts outlining the what/how/who of marketing your product, growing an email list, getting paid signups.

Congratulations and good luck growing your product.

[+] ProductBuilder|11 years ago|reply

No paying users. Its an informational site. I have ads on it.

Thanks for the link. Will check it out.

[+] mattm|11 years ago|reply

Do you have money? Come up with a marketing strategy and then just pay people to do the stuff you don't like. Getting people to write blog articles, manage your Twitter/FB page or reach out to bloggers doesn't need to cost that much.

[+] ProductBuilder|11 years ago|reply

Yeah, I got some money.

Where would one look for people to do the PR stuff?

[+] rrpadhy|11 years ago|reply

Partner with someone who loves marketing and believes in your product idea.

[+] general010|11 years ago|reply

This is definitely something you can outsource. Be sure to define a clear goal for the person to achieve (ie)'get more users' and a budget to work with. Offer a bonus for reaching a goal.

To get more traffic you can:

- create and submit content to blogs your potential customers would read — with content thats valuable to them. You link back to your site with what you do or how you help. You can hire writers for this.

- set up an affiliate program (http://www.shareasale.com/)

- set up a 'retargeting' campaign with something like adroll.com, so that the users that flowed in from the above methods are displayed ads that follow them around the internet until they convert

- ad networks; google, facebook, twitter, linkedin, stumbleupon, pinterest, buysellads, ...dating sites - depends on the product, you need to experiment with what works.