It seems I am one of those in the tarpit.

I think the problem for us engineering types is that there is so much bullshit around marketing, that it's offputting to us. That's the case for me at least. If I spend time/money on a feature, I know how long it will take, how much it will cost and when it will be ready. Compared to this, marketing seems like burning money with voodoo rituals.

It doesn't help that marketing efforts are only meaningfully measurable on a larger scale. If you're bootstrapping something yourself, you don't have 12k to spend on marketing this month. You have $300. It's easy to burn that $300 on adwords or facebook ads and get zero signups, with no meaningful data whatsoever.

The usual advice goes: hire a marketing expert. But how do I hire a marketing expert that a) isn't full of it, b) will even listen to me if my current budgets are in the hundreds of dollars?

I think the article is right on point, but I wish it pointed me to a way to deal with the marketing problem.

There are many HN discussions with practical steps for startup marketing.

Side Project Marketing Checklist

・ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002079 (Aug 2017, 68 comments)

・ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942902 (Aug 2017, 68 comments)

Ask HN: Building a side project that makes money. Where to start?

・ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14039135 (Apr 2017, 248 comments)

--

A couple more free resources:

Getting Real, chapter 13: Promotion (2006)

・ https://gettingreal.37signals.com/#ch13

Growth Hacking: How to Acquire Users (2017)

・ https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/intro

Half of this article could be summed up as "Validate your idea/product. Do not assume what people want."

The other half is "Marketing is not stupid". Marketing, sadly, is something that many of us are not good at. People still believe that if you build it, they will come. Myself, I have a several dead side projects that nobody came for, as do many here.

Also, maybe I've been out of the adword world for too long, so question for you folks that are living it now. Is a $70 CAC about average? I find that a bit high but I suppose if it only takes 2 months to recoup then their CLV must be good.

For many funded startups, they have the opposite scenario — growth that wholly depends on marketing that masks the product deficiencies. As soon as you lay off the gas, product deficiencies become apparent, so you are tempted to raise more and more money.

I'm Sed and I'm addicted to adding more features to my startup.

This article talks to my heart. I have been working on my startup for 7 years now. For all these years, I have been adding more and more features, changing the product direction twice and still not knowing if we have something valuable.

I want to start marketing right now and stop adding more features!

P.S. Anyone interested in helping me? I am willing to split the profits for the lifespan of a user if you can help me acquire new paying users!

I guess lots of founders forget that an early tech startup is still a small business and similar rules apply whether you're starting the next Uber or opening a new restaurant.

Marketing and sales are super important. R&D is super risky. This is true for every business. To de-risk, spend more on the former and less on the latter.

If the author of this article would try to persuade me to join his company as a techie, I would say no. The reason is simple: as experienced as he sounds (and he sounds like a total badass, by the way), the overarching conclusion that a hacker may take away from this article is "startups are little more than a lot of clever marketing".

Which is sad, in a way. We all read about how Woz was hacking logic boards during the early days of Apple, or how Sergey and Larry built their company on top of their groundbreaking PhD research. As a techie, you would dream that you can join a team where your contribution is crucial and consists of something that can't be outsourced to Ukraine. Yet, this mostly doesn't appear to be the case.

Sad.

> We invested all of our seed funding in developing a great product. In doing so, our feature list expanded, but our actual revenue growth never changed in a meaningful way to support that development.

I think the key distinction to make here is that a "great product" is not defined by whether or not it is feature- complete, pleasant to use, etc. but whether or not your customers like using it, consequently paying you for it. Likewise, any change you make to your product should only be considered a positive delta if it makes people like it more (or pay more for it); otherwise, it's just a prettier/faster/more complicated product, not a better one.

Month 2 into building a startup and found this article very relevant. I think one of the challenges I personally face is that building more features feels safe. You can spend a whole day trying to reach out to more people to validate the problem and come away with nothing. A day of coding gives you something tangible.

Since we're B2B focused, my co-founder and I resolved this by deciding to go the consulting route to build the product. We essentially banned ourselves from writing code until we found someone willing to pay us to write the feature.

Features != Success, is such an important truth, I wish every new founder could somehow be made to understand it.

Build one simple feature that people are willing to pay for and start marketing and selling it is by far the path of least resistance.

(Then carefully grow your product outward from that point)

I think the thing that affected me the most is trying to solve all of the problems with ever more code and cleverness. I actually think the less code you have as a startup the better, I suppose this is a small expansion of "Do things that don't scale". Avoid writing code.

This is a fallacy within technical circles: that the world will somehow immediately recognize the intrinsic value of a feature/addition as soon as it becomes public and that it'll therefore spread on its own merits. It's good to always keep in mind that history is littered with perfect technologies that failed miserably. Creating the perfect mouse trap without placing it where it'll catch mice is useless.

P.S.: Been there, done that.

Key word here is retention. The author was in a pretty good position to be in, where the paid users were happy enough not to churn and move to the competition. Once you're there - you have product market fit, and you should presumably move into growth mode. That means more expenses on sales and marketing, and diverting r&d resources to scale (if needed) and building features that will reduce churn or help marketing.

Another way to describe the situation here is - moving to growth mode too late, when you already have a good enough product to attack with but you're also almost out of runway.

Marketing is crucial when you have the right product. If a startup spends tons on marketing and there are product deficiencies, then users are going to come and go.

They missed `withstanding` in this classic https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/07/25/how-i-met-my-w...

One thing I don't really have much experience in doing is measuring growth. Is this something you have to figure out before avoiding the tarpits?

startup tarpit is a juicy phrase.