I know I need marketing help but giving equity to someone I met online feels like a huge risk. At the same time hiring a paid marketer when you have zero revenue feels just as scary. And I'm not dancing on TikTok, that's for sure.
Have any of you actually taken on a marketing co-founder? What made you say yes to that person specifically? Was it their track record, the way they pitched, a trial period first?
1. Don't give up after the first month of no traction, if you can get at least 1 customer at this stage that is a good sign.
2. Make contact with every customer you acquire, find out why they installed your product and what they want from it. Build any feature that they say is missing and offer the best customer support possible
3. Repeat this for a period of time. Once you have more customers the circumstances will change but this how you go from 0 -> 1 and get some runway IMO
It’s easy to get carried away building every request, especially with early adopters who likely aren’t actually invested yet but may be excited about their own vision for it.
My personal experience is that too much of it leads to the product becoming a sort of shapeless, unwieldy ooze. Or perfect for one customer and few others. Some things can be tough to undo later too, so you might end up supporting them a lot longer than you’d like.
I just launched something and the first few days have been quiet. Reading this made me decide to keep going.
Point 1 especially. Thank you.
I think the "Make contact with every customer" hits hard here. I think a bunch of people forget they you talk to people more.
Nothing to say, great advice.
If you’re doing that honestly, where they really have that problem and you actually have a good solution, you’d be a jerk not to lightly pitch it at that point.
You could probably do that up to 100 or so customers reasonably easily.
Marketing comes later.
I tend to interview 30-50 people initially to find a gap in the market. If I'm into something (strong PMF), a good percentage of those people I interviewed will be future buyers.
I typically have cascading meetings for the following steps:
1 - is this 10X better than what currently exists
2 - does our prototype look 10X better
3 - does our v1 solve the gap we found
4 - what features do we need to build in order to get you to pay for it
5 - what features do we need to get you to refer us to 3 friends
A meeting for each of those goals typically leads to customers (again, if I've found PMF).
If you can't find your target market, you might want to consider a different demographic that you understand better. Most successful startup founders started a business specifically to solve the problems they dealt with at their last job. They understand their product market fit because they ARE their target market.
First step is guessing who your customers might be.
But sure, I'm working on things for parents/students, home buyers, and DIY heat pump installers.
* Parents/students hang out at schools and are probably a good referral/recommendation crowd
* Home buyers are looking for mortgage comparisons on Google (but that's probably a terrible strategy, since this is a highly lucrative segment to market to, so you should expect high customer acquisition costs)
* DIY heat pump installers will probably look at ads on /r/DIYHeatPumps
Marketing comes first. Sales second. Product third.
I found the only thing that reliably works is direct sales. Find people that could potentially use your product and message them. Find them in forums, chats, email, LinkedIn, wherever.
If I had something I was into or did and someone took the time to reach out to me to try to show me something they built in a personal way, I would definitely be receptive.
Online stuff is cheap. I built products, posted on Reddit and had literally thousands of people come to my site. Not one person bothered to go to the home page and ask "what is this product". And this was when there were a lot fewer bots and scrapers. No ones going to use your product because he saw some crap on TikTok. It's cheap engagement
I think I am definitely gonna try the direct sales approach, to try and fill out the platform once its ready.
If your product is a wellness product or app, that's like catnip for a TikTok influencer. If it's a B2B SaaS, probably the opposite.
I brought on a high-touch salesperson on spec years ago and it did not work out. He and I were really successful at getting audiences with people but we never made the sales we were looking for and, worse, he lost me small cheap jobs that I could have sold myself. He'd probably say it was a product problem and he might have been right but later on I found out I wasn't the only person who had the same experience with him.
For some products you need those kind of skills. I've met people like him who really are worth their weight in gold.
For other products you need somebody who can make an Adwords campaign, analyzes the analytics, refine it and repeat. That kind of person can be worth their weight in gold too.
For this conversation to be productive you have to have some idea if you need one or the other or a bit of both.
Not universal for every product but for the right one it's a really clean distribution channel that compounds over time. The "make calls with users" part is universal though, that's the one I keep avoiding and probably shouldn't.
How long before the SEO started moving for you?
In general, the answer usually is to find people in your own network. If you go by that funnel the first thing you need is a network. LI is great at this. The next thing is to see who in your network is worth talking to. Find out whether the pain-point that you recognized resonates with them. A LI blast to your network might work as well to give you a bit of credibility. One thing that is cited often that does NOT work is spamming people asking for their time to learn about a problem. Nobody ever got back to me wit this method. But asking people in your own network for warm intros almost always works.
What I do is stop building and focus 100% on marketing - well, 90% because I can't help myself. Even if this isn't as "fun", you need to switch modes and stop building.
As for my approach, I start with Google Ads + SEO/AEO. Google ads can get results in a few weeks (Google does have a learning phase) and SEO and AEO is a much longer process, which can be months before you see results. I use AHREF to check my SEO/AEO progress. While AHREF isn't a direct measurement of Google, I've found their DR to be correlated with my organic traffic.
Good reminder that ads can show results fast while SEO compounds slowly, running both makes sense.
Source: CS grad turned revenue person
I got one question that I can't find the answer to on the website.
What sql variants does it support? Postgres? MariaDB?
I'm pretty sure my primary job is marketing the work that I do.
This significantly reduces bounce rate compared to a traditional landing page and I've had good success getting to the top of popular search terms after a few months/years.
You can't buy it if you have no idea it exists, right?
So how do you get the word out to the potential duatomers? You can read traction (the book), or just ask gemini/perplexity where you should advertise to find them.
I seriously wonder if that can happen today. As a technical founder, I have tried to find a marketing partner for years. Every time it has failed miserably as each one proved unable to move the needle.
In my case, it could be the product, but I wonder who has seen success in this day and age.
I'm actually building something about this, would love to stay in touch and share it with you when it's live. Might be exactly what you've been looking for.
In case you are interested to stay in touch, shoot me a message. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lazarbogosavljevic/)
I once knew a guy who was disabled and walked on crutches. Jobs got mad at him for being late to a meeting, and the guy replied "well someone parked in the handicapped parking spot, and it took me awhile to walk from a normal parking spot.
No joke, Jobs looks him (a disabled person) directly in the eye, and says "oh, that was me; I think the country built an excess of disabled parking spaces after WW2." To the disabled guy!!!
doesn't seem like you're risking much if your products are not getting any traction in the first place
In business, selling is much much much more important than making because if you have money you can hire technical workers. But nobody will care nearly as much about survival as you.
And if you have a technical background you are much more likely to have technical people in your network. Good luck.
Ourbit (ourbitapp.com) is still a work in progress (wrapping up the demo/assetes/characters).
BuzzBench is down but the repo is open and there's a demo video if you want to see what it did: github.com/LazarKap/buzzbench / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAnbZMoQvmQ.
Building something new right now that's directly about this problem, will share when it's live.
Next to this, I have like 3 more failed projects.
I am currently taking it.
From the landing page:
> Most of us, when we want to ship a product, we start at the beginning and with the most obvious ingredient: the product. Because when you can create, the act of creating feels most natural and straightforward. But it makes it so easy to end up with a product that nobody wants to buy. And isn't that every new entrepreneur's worst nightmare? All that work, and nobody cares.
Marketing for Founders
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47380295
> I know I need marketing help but giving equity to someone I met online feels like a huge risk.
No offense, but your equity, from your own admission, is literally worthless. If someone decides to help you out for your equity, you should be jumping for joy. Most likely you need to pay out of your pocket, but if you're not willing to risk your own capital, then how can you expect others to risk theirs?