
Code is Not That Important, Marketing Is - nsoonhui
http://itscommonsensestupid.blogspot.com/2009/08/code-is-not-that-important-marketing-is.html
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edw519
Marketing is important for revenue.

Code is important for profit.

If your code is buggy, difficult to maintain, doesn't do what it's supposed
to, doesn't scale, isn't easy to enhance, etc., etc., etc., you will spend all
of your margin on getting it to be what it should. And drive profit to zero.
Or worse.

Actually, in the current world of try before you buy, test driving, and
freemium, code is important for revenue, too.

Code not important? You're preaching to the wrong audience.

~~~
jacquesm
The audience does not make the facts though. In practice crummy code +
excellent marketing win over excellent code + crummy marketing.

Code is important, but unfortunately - I'm much more of a coder than a
marketeer, in fact I have a pretty strong antipathy towards marketing -
marketing wins out.

There are a few exceptions to that rule, but not enough to hope that your
reincarnation of an IT business is going to be that exception.

Write good code, but please do not forget that if you want to turn a buck that
you'll have to spend as much attention to the marketing of your product, if
not more.

~~~
edw519
_...I have a pretty strong antipathy towards marketing..._

I have never really understood this.

I'm as introverted as the next guy and find pleasure in the endless hours of
building something out of nothing.

But I get just as much pleasure talking about what I'm doing, how I'm doing
it, what can be done with it, and who it can help.

When you get right down to it, isn't that just another instance of marketing?

~~~
jacquesm
That's true. But there are shades to marketing.

I find it perfectly ok to talk to people that are interested in my product,
and I'm pretty good at it. But I'm allergic to cold calling prospects and
pushing my product where no real interest exists.

That is how the big money is made though. So I'm happy with my little niches,
I'll probably never be a billionaire, on the other hand my 'startup' has been
putting food on the table to the tune of about 50 manyears in the last decade,
which is not a bad score for what was essentially a single good idea and a
crappy implementation at first.

EDIT: Honestly, I wished it was the other way around, that code really would
trump marketing and that all customers were informed about the products they
are buying. Unfortunately that is not the case, so if your competitor is
selling slickly packaged junk that is of a lesser build quality than your
magnus opum and you hope to compete on that you'd better be better in
marketing than they are or you will lose.

~~~
edw519
I agree with most of this and disagree with a little.

You see, I think there is great hope for us. I simply do not fear slick
marketing and packaging any more. The world is slowly changing so that
prospects are more willing than ever to weigh a proper demo over all the
slickness. A proper demo that clearly shows how this offering solves _their_
problem. 30 years of crap and vaporware have produced a slightly more saavy
buyer of software. One who is also more willing to try the little guy who
didn't have a chance 10 years ago.

Has it changed enough? Not yet. Do we still have to market? Of course. But I
think the glass is more half full than half empty. IMO, delivering real
solutions to customers' problems is about the best marketing you can do.

~~~
jacquesm
I think this little discussion has identified a new niche: Consumer watchdog.
Place yourself as a party knowledgeable in the field in between customers and
their suppliers during the procurement phase. Since you speak the language of
both worlds you should easily be able to save your customer a multiple of the
fee you'll charge them.

Naturally this only works on projects that cost a good bit of money but it may
help to create some consciousness wrt to lesser purchases as well.

------
makecheck
I can certainly see how the market has won over code in many situations.

I find it personally frustrating, because it goes against my ethical code: I
care about what I create, and won't work for a company that takes short-cuts.
I would especially walk out the door if it became clear that they were trying
to hide serious flaws under the guise of a quality product.

The industry is so young, that it is difficult to protect consumers. There are
people being fooled into purchasing all kinds of things, but at least with a
toaster there are regulations like "can't electrocute people". With software,
no one demands to see the source to ensure they haven't invested in an
unmaintainable piece of garbage; and license agreements are laughably evasive,
ensuring that companies aren't really responsible for anything.

That's why I am still interested in seeing where open source goes. In just 5
or 10 more years (a lifetime for maintaining code), some of the worst
offenders in corporate environments could be really screwed, as their rickety
messes start to crumble. Their most talented programmers will likely have left
in disgust. Marketing will becoming increasingly the task of putting lipstick
on a pig.

Whereas, many free software projects are basically honest: you can't really
hide ugly hacks in open source, and maintainers are already highly motivated
and eager to show the world how they think something should be done. Young
people are already more likely to be knowledgeable about software, which will
lead to more forms of marketing based on quality (e.g. writers, colleagues,
neighbors, friends, who can guide your decisions based on quality and not
flashy ads). For the rest that isn't open-source, government may catch up a
little and start bending the industry to avoid some of the worst offenses.

~~~
psawaya
To risk stating the obvious -

Most great coders code because they love doing it, or love what they're
making. Despite commercial contributions, open source projects thrive on this.
When you're a company that sells software, you exist to sell more software.
That's the purpose of marketing.

Good code is only useful to the extent that it makes it possible to continue
marketing new features, and thereby increase sales. I think this is the reason
for the distrust programmers have traditionally had for the people who sell
what they make.

------
lsc
You need to be _extremely_ good at marketing (or at least, have a whole lot of
it) to overcome a significant technical disadvantage. I mean, it can be done,
but it takes a lot of marketing muscle.

I think most people are better served by focusing on what they are good at.
Sure, your company will always have to do some marketing, if nothing else, you
need to somehow let your users know 'hey, product X exists. it does Y."

You will also have to create a product of some sort.

if you have more marketing muscle, then sure, squeeze out some fetid failure
of a product that crashes every other day, and that requires a re-install
every 6 months. market the heck out of it, and you can win.

but you know? without a huge amount of marketing muscle, that won't work.

If you don't have much by way of marketing skills, produce a good product.
Sure, you still have to market it, but marketing it becomes much easier,
because once one person sees it, she is going to tell five others how great it
is.

so yeah, marketing and technical competence are substitutable to a degree. I
disagree strongly with the thesis that one is way more important than the
other.

To take an example from the article, sure, fogbuz is beating out other bug
trackers that are about as good, that don't have good marketing. If fogbuz was
not about as good as those other bug trackers, though, significantly more
marketing muscle would have been required.

I think why marketing seems more important at the top end of the market (that
is, it's easy to name examples of technical superiority being trumped by
marketing) is that it is easier to scale marketing, if you are a large
company, than to scale technical competence.

Even then, it makes sense to do a cost/benefit and say 'if we diverted x
percent of the marketing dollars to dev, how much more good word of mouth
would we get?' or 'if we divert x dollars from development to marketing, how
many brand new customers in new markets would we get?'

This is ignoring that 'figure out what the user wants' is generally considered
part of marketing, and is often an important part of building something worth
having. (it doesn't need to be... you can start with 'what would be best for
the user' - assuming that you can design something the user can not imagine,
that the user would like once they see it because it works better. Both are
valid places to start building a product.)

------
JacobAldridge
Treating this as an either/or discussion overlooks the reality of business,
and the world, which demonstrates that to be successful you need to do both.

Great Marketing + Crappy Code / Product = pets.com

Great Code + Crappy Marketing = The-next-big-thing-nobody's-heard-of-or-will-
pay-for.

Probably the most telling part of this was talking about the _"the world
perception didn't seem to value the geek's contribution"_.

If you can't demonstrate value (which is marketing in a nutshell) then the
value (which is business cashflow and profit in a nutshell) won't be there.

~~~
teej
You can't tie features, product, and code quality together either. Even the
most brilliant code is worthless if it isn't solving the customer's problem.
This was the issue with Eric Ries' first version of IMVU - they built an epic
piece of IM integration software that they trashed because no one wanted it.

~~~
jacquesm
so, in sequence then:

1) identify a problem that your customers want you to solve

2) solve the problem, sketchy at first and sound out your market about the
solution you are offering

3) iterate a couple of times between (2) and (3)

4) your initial users are now your most valuable marketing tool, by now they
have built a relationship with you and they should be happy

5) big rollout to all the users that you have that are comparable to your
'pilot' customers

6) back to 2! keep doing it, improve the product, fine tune your marketing
pitch and do not ever forget about the one at the expense of the other.

With some variations this scheme works for both b2b and b2c.

~~~
JacobAldridge
I think that's a nice sequence for product-marketing development.

At some point you'll have to deal with all the business support stuff
(Premises, HR, Accounts). And then when you get big enough and start hiring
people to do most of the product-marketing work, then you'll need to have some
business management aspects like Vision/Strategy, client base management etc.

But this process should serve you through ramen profitable, and beyond.

------
dbul
I think there is a balance between code, marketing, and customer service: if
no one knows about your product, you have no customers (marketing); if your
product is buggy, you lose customers (code); unless you apply the third and
fix bugs for your customers at the drop of a hat (customer service) in which
case you'll probably not only retain customers you would have lost, but gain
customers from word-of-mouth.

~~~
vaksel
I think it depends on the stage of the company:

Early on? Marketing is the most important thing you need, since you need the
users. You can get away with a crappy code since people are willing to give
you the benefit of the doubt. Customer service is more or less useless too,
since you don't really have any users to customer serve.

Mid-Stage? Coding is the most important. Best example is twitter. At this
stage you are growing more or less organically, so you need to have great code
in order to scale properly. You also need that good code to release more and
more features to keep up with the competition.

Late-Stage? Customer service is the most important. At this stage your product
is more or less polished, and you pretty much got as much market share as you
can get. At this stage you need great customer service to keep the users you
already got.

~~~
lsc
I disagree strongly. If you have ever looked at 'enterprise' software, it's
generally crap. have you ever tried to use remedy? it looks like something I
wrote when I got my hands on my dad's copy of FoxPro as a 14 year old.

People tolerate bugs if you are a big guy marketing to other big guys. middle
management would rather do what everyone else is doing (and thus not get fired
when it breaks) even if what everyone else is doing is clearly worse than some
other product. they have no incentive to choose the better product, and a
strong incentive to do what everyone else is doing.

Heck, even in the consumer market, crap is tolerated if it's big. look at the
downtime twitter has.

On the other hand, when you are first starting out, people expect to write you
off as incompetent. And they will, quickly, if they see a misstep.

I would argue that people expect more out of small and or new companies. Maybe
they should; there are many inefficiencies inherent to the standard
corporation model.

------
fauigerzigerk
Yeah, I still vividly remember the TV ad that inspired me to use google for
the first time and keep using it even though it's always been complete crap.
Altavista's marketing just couldn't keep up ;-)

No, really, that blog post misses almost all the variables in the equation.
What about making something useful or entertaining? What about making
something cheaper? What about making something simpler? All of that is neither
about marketing nor about code quality.

So everything he really says is that you need to let people know about your
product. Who would've thought?

------
10ren
Both are important: product development + marketing. Mr commonsense once
thought that code was all-important, and now, it seems, makes the opposite
error.

New technology can and does make a difference. Edison focussed on technical
contribution, so did Hewlett Packard (once), and google began with technical
innovation in a saturated market.

Though to be fair, it's the technology that makes the difference (the concept,
the algorithm, the insight, the approach) not the code per se.

------
keefe
Ugh and sigh to this article. What to pick to poke at? "If there was a killer
algorithm, it would have been implemented by a fair share of the quant shops
in a short time and thus drive down its usefulness." Seriously? Nobody can get
a special insight that is extremely hard to replicate? It's like this guy
swung too far to the other side of the continuum. Yes, getting people to use
your software and making useful software are both importat.

------
dpnewman
Merit in this examination for sure, but I would have used the StackOverflow vs
ExpertExchange comparison to argue the exact opposite side. Maybe there's some
gray area of where code and marketing begins and ends. Site UX, flow, the
subtle bells and whistles, design patterns and iterated, tested UIs are code
to me.. and this what make Stack what it is.

~~~
akronim
Stack overflow got exposure to thousands of developers from day one thanks to
Joel/Jeff. If they'd stuck the site up anonymously it would be nowhere near as
well used now, and might even have never got anywhere without an initial
critical mass of users and questions/answers.

The UI might keep users interested once they're there, but it's not going to
get them there in the first place.

------
nico
Ironically, the head of the CS department at my University used to say:
"unfortunately, positioning is more important than knowledge".

This means that Microsoft would probably not have happened if Bill Gates'
mother hadn't been connected to IBM's chairman at the moment. Microsoft didn't
even write the first DOS they sold to IBM!

------
jmtame
i would challenge the average hacker to step back and think about this. mark
zuckerberg was a fan of perl (not the most attractive language, but hey it
gets the job done). facebook still operates on php.

do a waybackmachine search on facebook's earliest version. it seems that
within weeks of their initial launch, they were in every online college
newspaper and several major news outlets. facebook marketed the hell out of
their application, and it beat a lot of rival college apps (some who made
threats against the facebook team early on and tried to ddos the site).

make your code easy to maintain, build a good product, and market the hell out
of it. people are not going to come if you build it unless it has an
overwhelming viral effect. but i'm seeing sometimes that a competitive
advantage means being in techcrunch before someone else.

------
zaidf
Without code, there is nothing to market.

~~~
ams6110
Sadly, this often makes no difference. Marketing can be done with prototypes,
screen mockups, or less.

~~~
zaidf
_Marketing can be done with prototypes, screen mockups, or less._

You are talking about a very specific type(ie. pitches) of marketing.

Majority of marketing is aimed to make you money. To make money, you sell
something. To sell something, you need a product. For many on HN, their
product largely consists of code.

~~~
shard
People have sold the idea of a product and a portion of their company to VCs,
without having a functional or complete product.

~~~
zaidf
Sure, but that is a very small minority.

------
known
recommended books to learn about marketing
<http://personalmba.com/recommended-business-books/>

------
Goladus
Good marketing starts with a good product.

------
cesare
How true.

~~~
embeddedradical
[correction] how sad, but true.

------
steve_mobs
marketing is the most important part of any business from software to
products. Marketing creates demand for a product. Peter thiel has always said
the most important part of any internet business is distribution. If people
don't know about your product and does not know why they should use it then it
will go out of business.

Case and point: twitter vs plurk. both are basically the same thing, but
twitter is going to put plurk out of business because twitter markets itself
better.

~~~
lsc
what is going to happen to twitter when they can't find a 'greater fool' to
give them money?

