

The $0 Marketing Budget Lie - ares2012
http://seanonstartups.co/2015/01/13/the-0-marketing-budget-lie/

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api
Seems like not picking. By $0 it's of course meant that you're not paying for
clicks, salesmen, and paid PR. Marketing is never truly completely free. At
the very least it takes time.

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ares2012
I was moved to write this after coming across so many founders that felt like
paying for advertising meant they were failures. At the same time, I saw
companies spending millions of dollars on advertising while claiming all their
growth was organic. It seemed unfair that founders were trying to live up to a
false role model.

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api
I'm one of those people who say "$0 marketing spend," and I don't mean that
it's bad to spend money on advertising. I've intentionally held back since I
wanted to see if there was "natural demand" to validate my product before
moving forward.

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ares2012
I'm curious - why hold back? Are you really testing natural demand or are you
testing how strong your personal social network is? I fear that many founders
aren't willing to do whatever it takes to get to a meaningful number of
customers/users and see if "natural demand" takes over. Many products require
thousands of customers for any organic growth mechanisms to kick in.

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api
Good question.

One reason is that I am not independently wealthy and haven't raised yet, so I
just don't have a lot of disposable income for this. It's still too early to
self-fund a large marketing push on its own, though if the graphs continue it
might be able to in 6-12 months.

The second reason is that yes, I did want to see if "natural demand" _pulled_
at the product without me doing very much to promote it. I'd like to raise
seed money, but I'm not excited about the prospect of raising a lot of other
peoples' money and then finding out I have something nobody really wants. Good
news is I've gotten enough signal to amount to a "yes, people do seem to want
more of this."

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ares2012
Awesome, congrats! Sounds like you are on to something.

