

Don’t throw away your competitive advantage - revorad
http://nathanbarry.com/competitive-advantage/

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jwwest
This is why there's so many products for designers and developers, honestly it
feels like we're a bunch of naval gazing, self-important idiots who never
learn to market correctly because we're too afraid to.

My biggest concern with the approach of picking something you have an existing
audience with or is in some corner of your wheelhouse is that it leaves a lot
of opportunity outside.

Is there not a huge competitive advantage in selling to underserved markets?
You may believe market saturation is "bullshit", but it's much harder to get
noticed in an already crowded field.

There seems to be two fields of thought on researching and marketing a
bootstrapped product:

1) SEO and niche marketing. This is the sort of thing that Rob Walling talks
about. Basically the idea is you research through Google keywords that you can
rank highly for and build a product around that, regardless of what you
yourself are good at. The problem with this is that the internet is full of
scumbags and many online audience "niches" are already taken. PPC is extremely
competitive as well.

2) Content marketing and "become famous". This is the approach that I think
Amy and Ryan Carson recommend. This has a longer path to success, years in
some cases, and is highly subject to survivorship bias. To be frank, it's hard
to get noticed in our little world unless you're a) an extreme extrovert and
b) extremely charismatic and/or c) really lucky.

There's a middle ground that Patrick McKenzie occupies that combines traits of
#1 and #2, but also introduces the free radical of underserved markets.
Actually, the reason for his success is that he initially started with an
underserved market, and then used that to gain SEO knowledge and internet fame
to leverage #2 to some extent.

I've emailed with Amy on this regard, her tone has been basically "Well, it
works because he's Patrick". I disagree with this sentiment because it sets up
a "Golden Calf" mentality that we mere mortals can't follow the same path.

~~~
jf22
Seriously.

Its like a startup circle jerk around here with everybody trying to sell their
lean social media analytics project management ab test tracker to each other.

~~~
erichocean
I don't mean to self-promote, but I spent an hour over the weekend making my
latest side project. If you have time, check it out at:

[http://le.an-social-media-analytics-project-management-ab-
te...](http://le.an-social-media-analytics-project-management-ab-test-trackr-
ly.io)

Feedback welcome! I spent the most time on the domain name.

Svtble writeup coming soon...there really is an art to coming up with ideas
like this, which I learned by choosing the best toenail clippers last summer
over a two week long deliberative process. I know most people wouldn't spend
that long on toenail clippers, but I had to have the best. It's who I am. Deal
with it.

Anyone want me to open source the code? All I did was add my copyright to the
Bootstrap CSS, but maybe someone wants that? Just let me know.

Also, I've made $0 in the 10 minutes I've had it online, without any marketing
or awareness other than this post on HN. What am I doing wrong? Is it too
early to monetize? Would Stripe integration help?

UPDATE: Sorry, my WP installation couldn't handle the load! I'll see if I can
get a cache up somewhere. Ironic that my first post was on "How I used a free
EC2 microserver to achieve 100% uptime with a million simultaneous connections
-- and you can too." I guess I should have tested it first.

UPDATE 2: Help!1! I'm being downvoted, but those cowards won't say why! What
could I do better with my comment?

------
nathanbarry
A lot of people enjoyed reading the conversation with Amy:

[http://unicornfree.com/2013/difficulties-for-nathan-
barrys-a...](http://unicornfree.com/2013/difficulties-for-nathan-barrys-app-
experiment/)

It's interesting, since we didn't plan on the transcript being public we
talked in a much more transparent way.

As always, happy to answer questions.

------
noelwelsh
These posts are a free masterclass on building an online marketing campaign.
I'm not really talking about the content of the posts, though that is
relevant. Rather, because Nathan is so open about what's he's doing, you can
really understand the reasoning behind each post and he often talks about
results in following posts. It's like you can see the construction plans if
you look closely enough.

I'm not really his target market but I follow along just to learn how to be a
better marketer.

~~~
jf22
Except he's not a master...

~~~
noelwelsh
Although your account is 3 hours old and you've only commented twice, both on
this post, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you want to
constructively engage.

This is a drive-by comment. It's useless. Why not add something useful. Why do
you hold this belief? What could Nathan do better? That would be interesting
to know.

Nathan may not be a master at marketing right now, but the way he's going
he'll get there. What he's doing is practically a textbook example of
deliberate practice, and the best thing for the observer is you get to see all
the mistakes along the way, instead of the cleaned up textbook version. I fail
to see how this is not useful.

Thoughts?

~~~
jf22
From what I know Nathan has launched two ebooks and a blog to an audience
familiar with Saas and digital goods.

Labeling him as a master after a couple of success stories is quite a leap.
Lets save the "master" term for people who have been in the game for a bit
longer.

\----

I did not say he won't be a master or that this post isn't useful.

------
enemtin
Great read. I often think people sell themselves too short, so it's always
good to reinforce not settling and know what your product/software is worth.

