Ask HN: How do I find a marketing person for my startup?

In theory, picking a marketing person is easy, since the person who's best at marketing is the one who convinces you.<p>But as a marketing guy, I have to point out that the big mistake many people make in marketing their products is to go too big, too early -- if you have something great, being one genuine person instead of a bigger, less genuine company is going to get you a higher return on investment.<p>A few ideas, though:<p>* Pick someone who cares about your startup and offers suggestions;<p>* Make sure this person can relate to your users (but not too well to sell to them -- you want an honest lawyer, not an impartial juror);<p>* Figure out where you could be getting customers, but aren't (if bouldr.net is the product, you'll want endorsements from bloggers who love climbing -- few people will know to search Google for what your app does);<p>* Start small, start freelance. Since marketing and hiring are both so error-prone, your top priority should be to make your mistakes cheaply.

Good marketing is about passion and the ability to communicate it. Someone on your own team is always going to have more passion for your product than an outsourced service.<p>If I were in your position, my first tactic would be to search within my existing user community for people with the skills I need. Put a message out through your forums, Facebook page, and twitter account (which I note is small - consider tweeting less about your tech, and more about the interests of your market, then follow people w/ appropriate interests on <a href="http://wefollow.com" rel="nofollow">http://wefollow.com</a>)...<p>Broadcast something like: "Want to be more involved in helping Bouldr grow?" and link people to short survey you'll create that can identify two types of people: potential customer evangelists, that simply need more support from your company, and potential marketers, who would be most effective as part of your team.<p>The criteria you're looking for for both are:<p><pre><code> * active users of your app * passion for rock climbing * good communication skills </code></pre> The most important things for each are:<p><i>Customer Evangelists:</i> large network, and either mobility across multiple geographic concentrations of your target market, or high amount of activity within a single large geographic concentration of your target market<p><i>Marketer:</i> knowledge of incentives / motivating people to contribute effort / content, SEO skills, ability to create interesting content for inbound marketing.<p>Failing to find these people within your existing userbase, I'd identify the marketing people at services targeting a similar demographic, and ask them if they could recommend people.<p>Shoot me an e-mail if you'd like further explanation / detail on any of the above.<p>Good luck!

My current startup has 2 developers and 2 marketing people... and honestly, I made a mistake. It should be 3 developers and 1 sales/marketing person.<p>Marketing people will purport to find out what kind of product the market wants, but will overlook actually getting people to want to buy said product... sales people will get letters of intent, or will sell the product before you make it (which is the way it should be apparently).<p>hope that helps

Since you are asking for marketing help, you should include a little bit in this post itself. Why lose a chance to brag about your great app on HN? Plus, you might get a bit more directed help from people who might know about your sector, but can't be bothered to google "Bouldr" (<a href="http://bouldr.net/" rel="nofollow">http://bouldr.net/</a>), figure out what you do and then come back here to give you advice.<p>Good luck!

Alternatively, you could get a friend or intern to help with the technical work and do the marketing yourself. This approach may make sense for several reasons. You have more passion for your product that any outsider. Also, it may be easier for you to learn what to do than for someone new to learn about the product. Just a thought.

You are probably much better off for now with an outsourced shop instead of a full-time person on-board.<p>You could also look at some of the companies like HubSpot that basically train you to do marketing and provide tools to measure effectiveness.

You may try <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_action" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_action</a>

Hi! Emil Hajric here, I'm a pretty good marketing person.<p>mail me at hajrice@gmail.com if you're interested...