
Avoiding Startup Tarpits - dtawfik1
https://medium.com/@DanielTawfik1/its-not-a-feature-problem-avoiding-startup-tarpits-7d5ec4b8c81b
======
jwr
It seems I am one of those in the tarpit.

I think the problem for us engineering types is that there is so much bullshit
around marketing, that it's offputting to us. That's the case for me at least.
If I spend time/money on a feature, I _know_ how long it will take, how much
it will cost and when it will be ready. Compared to this, marketing seems like
burning money with voodoo rituals.

It doesn't help that marketing efforts are only meaningfully measurable on a
larger scale. If you're bootstrapping something yourself, you don't _have_ 12k
to spend on marketing this month. You have $300. It's easy to burn that $300
on adwords or facebook ads and get zero signups, with no meaningful data
whatsoever.

The usual advice goes: hire a marketing expert. But how do I hire a marketing
expert that a) isn't full of it, b) will even listen to me if my current
budgets are in the hundreds of dollars?

I think the article is right on point, but I wish it pointed me to a way to
deal with the marketing problem.

~~~
jwr
Replying to myself, after 11h. There is a good number of replies, and they
mostly underscore my point: I do not know how to deal with the problem and
there is no defined way to go about it.

Most replies focus on "talking to your customers", validating your idea, etc.
I know, you should talk to your customers. It's all good. I do. But this won't
get you out of the tarpit. Talking to your customers mostly gets you new
feature requests, so you end up building new features.

Also, once you have a business with a bunch of paying customers, the situation
is different. You know the product can sell. If you can get 10 paying
customers, you can also get 100, and probably 1000, too. That was what the
original article was about.

There was precious little practical advice in the comments, apart from
"content marketing" and guerilla marketing. One is something pretty much
everybody does, and the other is difficult to pull out for B2B.

libertyEQ has a great point: we know so little about the whole subject that we
even don't get the naming right. Sorry. For the moment I'll just keep calling
all this stuff "marketing", until I understand it better.

My original point still stands: the article got it right, and the reason why
we hackers build features instead of doing marketing is because marketing is
hard, poorly defined, and there is so much fluff, myths and cliches around it.
I'm still looking for a solution.

~~~
ddebernardy
If talking to your clients mostly gets you new feature requests, it either
means your product isn't adequate yet or you're not asking the right
questions. In a nutshell you want to get of feel of:

\- What was going on in your clients' heads before they found you. What
precise problem were they trying to solve. This'll give you insights on
whether or not your product is adequate, and on how to phrase your landing
page.

\- How they went about to look for you. What google search they did, whether
they checked out reviews and how, etc. this is to better focus your SEO and
adwords campaigns.

\- What their decision process looked like. Was it a single person making the
call, or were several people involved? What objections got raised? What were
their key decision criteria? Raise them in your sales copy or in drip emails.

\- Are they talking about your product? Would they? This is to help you spot
segments with viral potential. Don't forget to politely ask for referrals if
applicable.

\- And, of course, feedback on the product itself. But don't spend too much
time on this, and don't promise anything or build expectations.

~~~
jwr
The product is adequate, because people are paying for it. It could be better,
hence the feature requests.

The most important thing I always want to know is how they found me —
unfortunately, for all of them it was via a search for a specific phrase. That
doesn't help me at all: I am prominently featured for that search phrase.

No viral potential, this is a niche B2B product.

------
j_s
There are many HN discussions with practical steps for startup marketing.

Side Project Marketing Checklist

・
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002079)
(Aug 2017, 68 comments)

・
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942902)
(Aug 2017, 68 comments)

Ask HN: Building a side project that makes money. Where to start?

・
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14039135](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14039135)
(Apr 2017, 248 comments)

\--

A couple more free resources:

Getting Real, chapter 13: Promotion (2006)

・
[https://gettingreal.37signals.com/#ch13](https://gettingreal.37signals.com/#ch13)

Growth Hacking: How to Acquire Users (2017)

・
[https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/intro](https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/intro)

------
ghettoCoder
Half of this article could be summed up as "Validate your idea/product. Do not
assume what people want."

The other half is "Marketing is not stupid". Marketing, sadly, is something
that many of us are not good at. People still believe that if you build it,
they will come. Myself, I have a several dead side projects that nobody came
for, as do many here.

Also, maybe I've been out of the adword world for too long, so question for
you folks that are living it now. Is a $70 CAC about average? I find that a
bit high but I suppose if it only takes 2 months to recoup then their CLV must
be good.

~~~
soneca
I believe the first validation of product must come regardless of marketing
skills. If you built a side project and no one is using it, it is a product
problem, not a marketing problem.

Actually, I believe a clever marketing tactic can be counter-productive in
such an early stage, as you might lure customers to a product that doesn't
deliver value.

So, your first few paying customers should come from building the product and
putting it in front of few people (your personal and professional network,
Show HN, Reddit).

After you have these first customers then it is time to stop underestimating
the marketing effort a successful product demands.

~~~
mgkimsal
> If you built a side project and no one is using it, it is a product problem,
> not a marketing problem.

If you built it but no one knows about it to come and use it, how is that a
product problem?

~~~
soneca
If "no one" means exactly zero person beside yourself you would be right. To
grow from exactly zero to a few dozens of potential customers you don't need
marketing. You need to tell people what you built. This is not an euphemism
for marketing, its exactly what it means, to tell people that you build it.
The very first sale must come from yourself telling people you already know
pra reaching people in online forums. I don't classify this as "marketing".

At most, you need to do sales, not marketing.

~~~
valuearb
Everything you’ve described, including product design, is marketing. Yes,
sales is a very narrow part of marketing to.

Marketing is knowing who you are selling to, what they want, and how best to
reach them.

------
savrajsingh
For many funded startups, they have the opposite scenario — growth that wholly
depends on marketing that masks the product deficiencies. As soon as you lay
off the gas, product deficiencies become apparent, so you are tempted to raise
more and more money.

~~~
dtawfik1
That's an interesting point that I hadn't really considered. Our startup never
got to that stage. We raised money, burnt through it and then had to figure
out how to salvage the situation being gritty.

------
ne01
I'm Sed and I'm addicted to adding more features to my startup.

This article talks to my heart. I have been working on my startup for 7 years
now. For all these years, I have been adding more and more features, changing
the product direction twice and still not knowing if we have something
valuable.

I want to start marketing right now and stop adding more features!

P.S. Anyone interested in helping me? I am willing to split the profits for
the lifespan of a user if you can help me acquire new paying users!

~~~
no1youknowz
I hear you and I'm in the same boat lol. Except that, I have been engaging
potential customers prior to a launch.

I am having 30 minute conversations and asking THEM things like:-

1) What their process looks like. 2) What pain-points they have. 3) What they
are actually using and paying...

We then brain storm what potential solutions could solve these pain points and
move onto:

4) How much they would be willing to pay to solve these problems. i.e, if
their ROI could increase by a certain % is paying the $$ a no brainer. 5) More
importantly, how much time they would be saving and is the $$$ a now brainer
now?

Features are great, they differentiate between yourself and your competitors.
But they aren't the goal. What is the goal, is making those features part of a
process flow and achieving a result that your customers want AND will be
willing to pay for, compared to your competitors.

What's the point in building a feature a potential customer won't use or
understand? Or even worse, is too complex and when they use it they leave
frustrated?

Bottom line is, you don't know if you have something because you aren't
talking to your market.

So stop what you are doing. Nowadays it's really easy. Go on Facebook, start
searching for some groups. Sometimes the gold is there because people are
asking questions and you can get a sense of where your product fits. Then
insert yourself into the conversation and start asking questions.

Start adding people and trying to engage them directly. Say you'll send them a
coupon or buy them lunch for 30 minutes of their time. You can setup a Skype
conversation and then glean lots of knowledge.

I would also suggest doing this with those who are experienced and in the
weeds. Because they could give you actual insights over what people THINK they
need.

Best of luck! :)

~~~
ne01
You are right! Without knowing the answer to those questions I feel like I
have been creating these features for myself.

I should start engaging on social medias.

Do you think Facebook is better than Twitter for this?

Thank you! :)

~~~
no1youknowz
Yes, Facebook is so much better! Purely for the groups aspect and usually you
have people engaging with competitors products and asking how to do things.

I personally don't bother with Twitter for this aspect of product validation.

~~~
ne01
Will definitely check out Facebook! Thanks again!

------
jnwatson
I guess lots of founders forget that an early tech startup is still a small
_business_ and similar rules apply whether you're starting the next Uber or
opening a new restaurant.

Marketing and sales are super important. R&D is super risky. This is true for
every business. To de-risk, spend more on the former and less on the latter.

------
smikhanov
If the author of this article would try to persuade me to join his company as
a techie, I would say no. The reason is simple: as experienced as he sounds
(and he sounds like a total badass, by the way), the overarching conclusion
that a hacker may take away from this article is "startups are little more
than a lot of clever marketing".

Which is sad, in a way. We all read about how Woz was hacking logic boards
during the early days of Apple, or how Sergey and Larry built their company on
top of their groundbreaking PhD research. As a techie, you would dream that
you can join a team where your contribution is crucial and consists of
something that can't be outsourced to Ukraine. Yet, this mostly doesn't appear
to be the case.

Sad.

~~~
dtawfik1
I am the author and I do agree with what you are saying. Our story was
different. I mentioned that one of the original sins of our company was how we
budgeted solely into product development. The other original sin was that the
idea for the company was ill conceived. We had been working on tech at another
company why not release as stand alone product. The idea frankly wasn't that
differentiated enough from other products out there. When you don't have a
truly differentiated idea like the companies you brought up, then marketing
becomes more and more important to get peoples attention. Part of what made
the examples you brought up special is that what they were working was so
unique. That differentiation/uniqueness makes it a lot easier to market (the
virality piece is more likely). In our case because we didn't have that. The
way to survive was that we had to fight it out bidding for ads on Google. I
would not recommend that path for anyone. It was just the environment we were
in. I would say even for those companies to focus on marketing will not be a
disservice, but focus on the initial conception of the idea even more. It
makes a world of difference in determining what kind of head winds you'll
face.

------
dpandya
> We invested all of our seed funding in developing a great product. In doing
> so, our feature list expanded, but our actual revenue growth never changed
> in a meaningful way to support that development.

I think the key distinction to make here is that a "great product" is not
defined by whether or not it is feature- complete, pleasant to use, etc. but
whether or not your customers like using it, consequently paying you for it.
Likewise, any change you make to your product should only be considered a
positive delta if it makes people like it more (or pay more for it);
otherwise, it's just a prettier/faster/more complicated product, not a better
one.

------
shrumm
Month 2 into building a startup and found this article very relevant. I think
one of the challenges I personally face is that building more features feels
safe. You can spend a whole day trying to reach out to more people to validate
the problem and come away with nothing. A day of coding gives you something
tangible.

Since we're B2B focused, my co-founder and I resolved this by deciding to go
the consulting route to build the product. We essentially banned ourselves
from writing code until we found someone willing to pay us to write the
feature.

~~~
jnetic
>I think one of the challenges I personally face is that building more
features feels safe. You can spend a whole day trying to reach out to more
people to validate the problem and come away with nothing. A day of coding
gives you something tangible.

Coming away with nothing and then to keep on trying. This has been the hardest
thing for me too. Coding/designing/building is way more fun and easy (in the
short-term).

------
jv22222
Features != Success, is such an important truth, I wish every new founder
could somehow be made to understand it.

Build one simple feature that people are willing to pay for and start
marketing and selling it is by far the path of least resistance.

(Then carefully grow your product outward from that point)

~~~
philsnow
It seems that you add more features, you attract more users, but I think that
if you've prioritized your features 'right', each additional one makes your
product attractive to fewer and fewer marginal users.

Also, when you get really down in the weeds, I bet it's easy to have a
daunting feature list that people bounce off of, especially if you don't have
a clear separation between marquee/headline features and detail features,
meaning you might make your product attractive to an additional 1% of users,
but 5% of your existing potential users fall out of the funnel because of the
word soup.

~~~
marcosdumay
> if you've prioritized your features 'right', each additional one makes your
> product attractive to fewer and fewer marginal users.

Only if they are independent. Features A + B may attract a bigger public than
both feature A or feature B alone.

------
andy_ppp
I think the thing that affected me the most is trying to solve all of the
problems with ever more code and cleverness. I actually think the less code
you have as a startup the better, I suppose this is a small expansion of "Do
things that don't scale". Avoid writing code.

------
kyaghmour
This is a fallacy within technical circles: that the world will somehow
immediately recognize the intrinsic value of a feature/addition as soon as it
becomes public and that it'll therefore spread on its own merits. It's good to
always keep in mind that history is littered with perfect technologies that
failed miserably. Creating the perfect mouse trap without placing it where
it'll catch mice is useless.

P.S.: Been there, done that.

------
ohadron
Key word here is retention. The author was in a pretty good position to be in,
where the paid users were happy enough not to churn and move to the
competition. Once you're there - you have product market fit, and you should
presumably move into growth mode. That means more expenses on sales and
marketing, and diverting r&d resources to scale (if needed) and building
features that will reduce churn or help marketing.

Another way to describe the situation here is - moving to growth mode too
late, when you already have a good enough product to attack with but you're
also almost out of runway.

------
strin
Marketing is crucial when you have the right product. If a startup spends tons
on marketing and there are product deficiencies, then users are going to come
and go.

~~~
valuearb
If a products target customers think it has deficiencies, you need to
reemphasixe marketing. Researching and understanding your target customers
needs and wants is the first, and by far most important part of marketing.

------
thadk
They missed `withstanding` in this classic
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/07/25/how-i-met-
my-w...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/07/25/how-i-met-my-wife)

------
hellopat
One thing I don't really have much experience in doing is measuring growth. Is
this something you have to figure out before avoiding the tarpits?

------
ouid
startup tarpit is a juicy phrase.

