Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

I absolutely hate hearing these things:<p><i>Remember, ideas are worth nothing. And these days, even your code is worth very little.</i><p>Alright, so creativity and idea-making worth <i>nothing</i>. Technical expertise to make it? <i>nothing</i>.<p>Honestly, what's left? The business side of things?<p>Maybe this article just bothered me because I was getting similar vibes to "you can just have an idea and hire some programming monkey to create it for you."<p>Or as he said it: <i>You and I could get together and clone almost any popular web application in a month. Or for that matter, we could simply buy a clone script. Twitter, Facebook, eBay, Groupon, Digg, and about 50 others are available for around $100 each.</i>

Reason #3: The boy who cried vaporware. If you end up with a history of advertising vaporware, nobody will listen when you finally get it right.<p>If you are super amazing and you can get your first product to market, this obviously doesn't apply. But most people aren't. And most of those who do, they're just lucky.<p>Reason #4: Duke Nukem Forever will be out any day now. If you take too long to get it to market, your product will be a joke and people will lose interest.

I'm ambivalent about this. Having been through a few different startups with various degrees of marketing, it seems like the issue is really sensitive to your product and your schedule.<p>Mog.com started out with minimal hype despite a lot of effort by its CEO, and had an very (almost disastrously) slow startup phase. When we ran into implementation difficulties we compounded this slow-start problem even more. Mog managed to pull through this because of prudent financials and perseverance, but it was a near thing.<p>Powerset had the opposite problem, we had so much hype we didn't know what to do with it. What Powerset delivered was pretty impressive, but much less than what people expected. Cries of "Deeply Disappointed!" rained down on us like drops of acid, and we were powerless to do anything but deliver on what we could and say the rest was either too expensive or too difficult for the moment. But we <i>did</i> have a lot of users and interest, so we had a huge launch.<p>Now I'm at BankSimple, which is somewhere in between these other plans. BankSimple is aggressively talking to people and getting their message out, so there is some pent-up demand. We're also very diligent about responding to people as people, we do a bit of research before replying to (almost every) email. This means that we get some impatient tweets and messages (“Who cares what you look like? Where is your service?!”) asking for unreasonably fast development time, but it also means we get a lot of insightful feedback and commentary.<p>Our biggest obstacle seems to be controlling the hype. It's very easy for people to build up what we promised into veiled hints some kind of complete reform of the US financial system, which is probably an unreasonable launch goal. ;)

After reading Zed Shaw's post yesterday about how "Long Beards" are getting marginalized by "Product Guys" I cringe when I hear bullshit like this:<p><i>Ideas (and in most cases even the code itself) is worth little. It’s marketing that makes the startup.</i><p>(Mind you, ideas <i>are</i> worth little, but the rest... yeah)

A reason not to start marketing right away:<p>- You may pick the wrong people to market to and they convince you to abandon your project<p>While this may save you some time, the people may just have convinced you to stop work on a valuable product.<p>Even though I've done a couple projects that haven't gone anywhere, the fact that I have completed them in a working and useful state has greatly helped me get interviews and led to higher paying work.

"No, these days even technical execution is mostly trivial (with a few exceptions for apps built around unique algorithms). Far more important is marketing execution."<p>Can someone please smack this idiot?

Another reason you may want to delay pre-launch marketing is that if you plan on patenting your product you can invalidate your ability to do so in certain juristictions (including most of the EU) simply by "disclosing" your invention.<p>If your landing page could be construed as an "offer for sale", and goes up more than one year in advance of your patent application, you've lost your ability to patent protect the idea in the US as well.<p>Of course most startups these days (the ones reading HN at least) are working on web apps and patents are not as commmonly employed. If you ARE working on a patentable idea though, you should do some research and consult with an IP lawyer before you go and put up any public marketing material before you have applications in to the jurisdictions where you want protection.

Yeah I should have started marketing two years ago, or at least show my idea to other people. I started that only after the first year, with a survey to find out if my idea is right (and it was). The thing about marketing, or anything that involves people from outside, is that you can easily motivate yourself by dropping details no one wants (saving time ftw) or add new ones if you see there's someone who's interested in this or that little extra.

Disagree: Technical and design execution matters a lot. Facebook was brilliant in both. While myspace pages were a mess and friendster was having trouble keeping the server up, facebook out executed both.<p>If you don't have a good product marketing can't help you. Marketing can give you an edge over other equally good products but cannot guarantee success.<p>Dropbox / Tweetie (before it stagnated) / Minecraft etc succeeded because the product was good. Not because of marketing

Marketing is hard as hell, especially so for developers.<p>As with many other articles like it, the advice given is too vague. We know that we need to market our product but how? Make a landing page, and get 600 subscribers out of the blue? Just blog it all up in the twittersphere and get 1000 likes, no problem?<p>Anyone who has tried that without a thorough understanding of marketing, and no real budget for it, will know it doesn't work like that.<p>When I read these marketing articles, it feels like they are explaining how to model my abstraction layers, when I haven't even written Hello world yet.

<i>Once this is setup the major task is driving traffic, which is far beyond the scope of this article.</i><p>Yes, and it's the hardest part of the process. Saying "start early" doesn't help much if you punt on "start what?" Glossing over that 650 strong list is skipping the meat of the subject. How much did they cost, where did they come from, and how long did they take to get? Those are the questions worth answering. You need to answer (or guess at) those questions before you decide when to start your marketing.

I think this is awful from the standpoint of morale (coming from personal experience). If you start marketing, and start getting positive feedback way too early, you end up cashing in the rewards a bit too early. Early positive feedback from friends killed many personal projects since I got the praise before I did anything and lost motivation to actually finish them.<p>YMMV, but this is how I react.

I'm not sure why we require 1,500 words to convey the very basic idea that you shouldn't build a product in a vacuum. This entire article could fit in a tweet:<p><i>Show it to the people you want to sell it to as you build it, and start building a mailing list before launch.</i>

"Ideas are worth nothing" - it's a big statement and quite a prevalent view these days.<p>I think it's true to an extent - a successful startup doesn't need an entirely new, innovative idea but at the same time a new, innovative idea doesn't necessarily result in a successful startup. I think what's more important is not the idea itself, but the angle you take to market your idea. And that is why the blog post has some sound advice.<p>For example, facebook wasn't the first social network but the way it marketed itself (ie exclusively to college students ) etc was quite effective. Google wasn't the first search engine but its 'clean, simple' branding was quite unique.<p>Your marketing strategy/approach shapes the design and the features of your product.

For every 1000 people who has the idea, one actually does it.<p>I think the really big differentiator is not <i>how well</i> you execute (in code or in marketing), but <i>whether you do it</i> at all.<p>If you're prepared to stumble-and-ratchet (ie. explore; try-fail-try-again; "pivot"; experiment), ahead of everyone else, you win.<p>The only exception is if someone is massively more skilled/knowledgeable/resourced/intelligent/determined than you. But a funny thing is... that for a new market-product fit, <i>you</i> are the expert, and the most skilled, because the only way to get the knowledge and skill is to stumble-and-ratchet. You are also most well-known in the market. It's really <i>hard</i> for someone to catch up.

You can build an email list cheaply, just use Google Forms: <a href="http://www.google.com/google-d-s/forms/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/google-d-s/forms/</a>

1. I think everyone here is missing the point of the article... Market now, not later.<p>2. There is a lot of "code above all" because we are programmers. The sad reality: All aspects of a business are valuable; the ideas, code (IP), marketing, user interface design, customer service, strategy &#38; processes! If you want to be successful, all aspects of your business need to be properly nurtured, provided for &#38; grown.

Idea x Execution x Marketing x Persistence x Luck = Success<p>Based on Sivers Multiplier idea:<p>- <a href="http://sivers.org/multiply" rel="nofollow">http://sivers.org/multiply</a>

Why not start a few days (at least) before you start coding?<p>"Sell before you build" is my new mantra.