
Ask HN: Build it and they will come or 50% marketing? - zuckerei
Being a complete product nerd, I tend to spend 90% of my time on improving my product (a website).<p>Therefore I love the idea of &quot;Build it and they will come&quot;. Which works for me to some extend (I am ramen profitable).<p>But often I also hear the opposite. In a recent Mixergy interview, Gabriel Weinberg suggests investing 50% of your time into marketing. And in his book &quot;Traction&quot;, Peter Thiel is quoted with the statement, that more startups fail because lack of distribution then because lack of product.<p>What do you guys think? How much marketing is enough?
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iqonik
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a
sound?"

You can spend countless hours making improvements but without a user base, you
have no idea if they are needed or wanted. Build your MVP, and whilst you're
building it, shout about it. Tell everyone. Nobody is going to steal your
idea.

Marketing should start from day one and in my opinion be bigger than a 50%
split. More like 70% marketing. This will let you streamline your development
time and only build things that will benefit your users, and ultimately your
revenue stream.

Good luck with your product :)

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draker
>You can spend countless hours making improvements but without a user base,
you have no idea if they are needed or wanted.

This is on the right track and I would say that the improvements, iterations
and additons to the product should be focused towards the revenue generating
users.

It can be difficult to identify this segment, but it is worth the time to do
so. Every user will have suggestions for improvement but if the person never
intends to pay for the product or only requires the free features then you are
wasting your time improving the product for them. This doesn't mean you should
ignore the non-paying users, rather you should listen primarily to their
suggestions for what the product requires for them to be a paying customer. If
you find that a large number of non-paying users would convert to paid if you
had X feature; determine the cost and potential revenue of adding the feature.

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rajnikant
Never waste your time to make the product perfect, Always follow the steps of
lean startup. Launch MVP (minimum value product) first and that too don't
launch directly. firstly beta launch it. there are many platforms which will
provide you the beta testers and early adopters.

Trust me once you beta launch your product early adopters will give you many
useful tips and most important the subscribe button and review of early
adopters will give the idea that whether your product is needed in the market
and upto what extent and what changes needs to be done

There review will help you to determine the direction of development and they
can even help you to determine the reasonable cost of the product(if you ask
them for it)

I have made this mistake so please never spent countless hours in development
just because you think its needed in the market take the review and idea
validation from experts.

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michaelZejoop
As a one person enterprise (zejoop dot com) I have been very product focused
to date and I have struggled to get test users. I had no idea there were beta
platforms, per se, so I Googled your phrase "beta testers and early adopter
platforms" and learned a lot - especially from particularly helpful post on
Quora.

That said, could you recommend top 3 such platforms in your experience?

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rajnikant
Yes try betapage.co, betalist.com, launchingnext.com,betabound.com and
producthunt.com, please note betalist.com is paid but rest of the platform are
free

~~~
michaelZejoop
Thanks! I discovered erlibird, but I'll check these out too.

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rajnikant
yup but erlibird is costly perhaps their plans starts from $1000

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Lordarminius
"Being a complete product nerd..." describes your dilemma. IMHO the barrier
countless many people face is psychological - creating a product is the cool
and geeky (read: intelligent) thing to do; marketing is for the less talented
people. Well, I'm here to tell you this: the moment you decide to derive gain
(and not necessarily financial gain alone) you switch hats from being simply a
geek to being a businessman(woman).

Marketing is not an option - it is a NECESSITY.

Great marketing can propel a mediocre or second rate product to dominance over
a demonstrably superior rival(s)- (microsoft, coke , kardashian kids, Im
looking at you)... Alternatively, it can serve to unlock the potential of a
truly valuable offering (Dyson,google,Star wars, I pad)

I would take your idea one step further: once you have your product up and
running, ALL your time not spent on critical maintenance tasks should be spent
on marketing until the product is entrenched.

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rcarrigan87
"marketing is for the less talented people"

I don't believe you intended to say this, but it read as such. If you think
marketing is for the less talented then you've been around the wrong
marketers...

~~~
cmenge
maybe you should re-read the statement: "the barrier [..] people face is
psychological: ... "

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MalcolmDiggs
IMHO: In most cases, dedicating 50% of your time to marketing is a good idea.
The notable exceptions would be:

* Your growth model relies on virality. (In which case, as long as you have _some_ traffic, that should be enough to test your model and potentially start growing).

* Your growth model relies on SEO (in which case, you should spend time on that, not direct marketing)

* Your growth model relies on referrals. (Think of a contractor who does no marketing himself, he just incentivizes his clients to refer new clients)

* Your business model doesn't rely on user growth (hard to think of an example here, but I'm sure it exists).

But in most cases, you've got to market the product aggressively. Think of how
many millions of sites exist (and are vying for your users' attention).
Without some effort put into marketing, there's little reason to assume a user
will visit your site at all.

That being said, you should do what you're good at. If you feel like the
product needs to be marketed heavily (and you don't enjoy that kind of work),
then maybe it's worth finding a co-founder who enjoys that part.

~~~
chadholt
Even if your growth model relies on virality, seo, referrals, you should run
some marketing tasks to validate your idea.

For example SEO takes a really long time to kick in. You do not want to build
a product and work on SEO, only to realize a few years later after site has
gone up in the SERPs that you built something no one wants. A better approach
is to run some ads before (and during) you build your product to validate it.
Even if the ads are not cost effective, initially it is worth paying for
validation.

~~~
siquick
this x 10

One of the most effective ways I've found to validate is to put up a landing
page with a brief overview of your offering and, explain that you'll be
launching soon and ask the user to enter their email address into a Mailchimp-
linked signup box.

Then spend $30 on super-targeted Facebook/Google ads for your niche and make
sure you ad links to the landing page.

If 25-30% of visitors enter their email address then you're onto something.

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PerfectElement
Is $30 statistically significant? Depending on the keyword, this could bring
only 10 people to your website.

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davismwfl
The reality is that 70% is marketing and 20% is customer service and 10% is
product. We could argue the actual percentages, but the majority is getting
the word out, the next part is taking care of people and the least part is the
actual product.

I have been part of products that were in all ways were superior to others but
failed miserably either from a lack of marketing or a lack of taking care of
the clients. But I have never been part of a product that had superior
marketing and customer service that failed. Not that I think it is impossible,
it is just that you get so much opportunity to succeed that it would take a
serious effort to fail IMO.

~~~
siquick
Are you classing Sales under Marketing here?

For so many B2B products, direct sales will beat most other acquisition
channels.

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davismwfl
Yes, just as broad groupings. Marketing in this case would cover Bus Dev,
Sales etc, where Product would cover engineering, R&D etc.

In my experience it is all about getting the word out and taking care of the
customers you get. Doesn't mean you can ignore the product just that you have
to be out focusing on clients more than product usually to get traction. As
you scale then the mix gets more balanced in my experience, but still favors
Marketing & Customer Service.

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Mz
You need to find the right balance for you. You need a solid product, but that
alone is not enough.

Think of marketing in terms of trying to get the word out to people who would
want to know. How do you find them? What do you need to communicate?

I don't think you should worry about the percent of time spent on X. Set some
goals, find some useful metrics, see what you can make happen.

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Gustomaximus
Evidence for both exist in the wild. 'Build it and they will come' seems the
more elusive, so in a generalist sense I would go with the 50% marketing. That
said I'm a marketer so what can you expect!

In my sphere I've seen so many companies over focus on the product and be
dismissive of marketing when It's clear they can grow there business cost
effectively via advertising.

I've also seen business throw money down the drain trying to buy their way to
success and unreasonably overcome the product weakness.

IMO the key is measurement of success/failure with marketing. And balance in
product/marketing focus. I read a great book that covers some of this call 'In
Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters'.

~~~
zuckerei
Thanks. Looks like there is broad consens for the 50% formula.

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buildops
Product is NOT enough. However, you need to look at marketing holistically. In
business school they teach the "4Ps of marketing." One is Promotion. Another,
though, is product.

You need all of them (price and place are the other two Ps) to have a
successful startup company.

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notahacker
A couple of thoughts (i) Some of the time spent tinkering with the website
counts as marketing. Redesigning the home page to better explain what your
service does is marketing, as is adding OAuth capabilities to simplify signup.
(ii) Really, the amount of time you need to spend marketing probably depends
heavily on whether it's aimed at mass market or an easy-to-reach niche,
whether it's something people actively look for or something they need
persuading might be a good idea, and whether you have competition. But
regardless of those factors it's probably greater than 10%...

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siquick
Slightly off topic but very relevant:

A lot of products fail because the entrepreneur built a product that noone
wants.

You'd be better off validating your idea before you spend any time building.

Analyse any existing products in your space and contact your target market and
ask them if they want your product and if not, why not. You'll learn so much
more doing this than you will spending 90% of your time building. :-)

I'd also add that building a pre-launch presence is essential. The more people
you can get to sign up to your email list/social media accounts, the bigger
audience you will have to launch to.

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stefankrafft
Just released a pod about Instabridge who grew from 0 to 1 million users
without any marketing at all! Pretty impressive work. Some learnings for all
of us trying to grow our businesses - [http://blog.haaartland.com/podcast-
instabridge-one-million-u...](http://blog.haaartland.com/podcast-instabridge-
one-million-users-without-marketing/)

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tmaly
Good question, I just launched an alpha site that is very rough looking. I did
do some social media while I was developing it, but it was not enough. I
second iqonik's quote about the tree. It sure felt that way when I launched. I
think marketing should be at least 50% marketing. How else will you get users
in this world filled with distractions and noise?

