
Ask HN: Love building Products, hate Marketing. Am I doomed? - ProductBuilder
I love coding and I love building products.<p>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&#x27;t like the idea of doing this. And I really suck at social things.<p>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&#x27;s not listed in any search engine. People twitter about it and share it on Facebook.<p>Any tips? How would you guys go about it? Can one outsource the PR part of a startup?
======
webstartupper
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
This seems a misunderstanding. I do not sell anything. It's an informational
website. A tool. More like Google then like Amazon.

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

Thanks for the link. Will check it out.

------
mattm
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
Yeah, I got some money.

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

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

------
general010
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/](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.

Message me through my site [http://www.10c.ca](http://www.10c.ca) if you want
to talk more.

~~~
ProductBuilder
See my comment to webstartupper. I do not sell anything.

~~~
general010
After someone uses your tool, maybe a couple times — create some built in
virility. ie) 'Like this app? Help up grow. Click to share.'

