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Ask Slashdot: I Just Need... Marketing?
An anonymous reader writes "Over the years, Slashdot has had many stories of non-technical entrepreneurs in need of programmers. Now I found myself in an almost opposite situation: I am a programmer with a fledgling mass-market product that needs marketing. I know Slashdot's general sentiment towards marketing. Without being judgmental one way or the other, I must say that for a product to reach the widest possible audience in a given time period, marketing is a necessity. Short of doing everything myself, I see a couple of options: 1. Hire marketing people, or an outside marketing firm; 2. Take in willing partners who are good at marketing (currently there are no shortage of people who want in). With these options, my major concerns are how to quantify performance, as well as how to avoid getting trapped in a partnership with non-performing partners — I already have a tangible product with a huge amount of time, money, and effort invested. Budget is also limited. (Budget is always limited unless you are a Fortune 500 business, but for now that's more of a secondary concern.) So here is my question to Slashdot: how do you address these concerns, and in a more general sense, how would you handle the situation: technical people with a product in need of marketing?"
Don't underestimate the importance of marketing. A crappy product can succeed with good marketing, but a great product will fail without it.
(I'm including positive word-of-mouth as marketing - even this you should work at)
Give an experienced marketing partner and interest in the net profit. That way you aren't losing any more cash than you generate. If your product is viable, there should be no shortages of these types of people.
Look at your friends first, do you have anyone in marketing? Do you know anyone who has succesfully self-promoted a mobile app or web service? You might know the right person already, or at least know someone who can point you to that person.
Shop your idea around, and make sure you get an NDA to prevent someone stealing your concept.
Trackball users will be first against the wall.
I went through this same thing with my first start up. Plan on spending 2/3 of your money on marketing. Only 1/3rd should be used to actually build/test/etc your product. You should be worried about how the app or product actually works. Don't do the marketing yourself. If you know how you want to market it, that's fine. If that's the case, hire someone to just take orders from you. If you don't know how you want to market it, hire someone that can utilize personal connections in the field you are in. It is simply not possible to program, secure funding, bug test, bug fix, and market all yourself.
Do you know your demographic?
Who are you selling this mystery widget to?
ADVERTISE/HYPE/BLOG
Rinse and repeat
Not controversial enough? Add a nearly naked model with an assault rifle.
If you're not selling anything now, whatever it is, doesn't work.
Back to the drawing board.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
As you have clearly discovered, a properly operating business needs a balanced team of managers and employees who can handle ALL aspects of the company's functions, not just engineering the product. Making the product is arguably no more or less important than selling it and collecting the money. You're the tech guy and visionary founder, and that's great. But you need a marketing and sales genius to handle the other functions. That person (and his or her subordinates) are critical to your success, so you want someone who is as invested as you are. That means a top-level executive with equity-based compensation. You need to pick someone with experience operating in a small startup environment (or if not, at least a business degree with a good understanding of small business operations), who has the personal assets to weather unprofitability, and who is comfortable staking his entire return (or close to it) on the success of the company. Guaranteed payments and large salaries for founding executives are inadvisable. Compensation should be tied 100% to profitability, or at least to rational business milestones if you don't anticipate profitability for awhile and you have the capital to support it.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
You designed and created a product without input from marketing? You realize that one of the key purposes of marketing is to determine if a product is even marketable right? Are you sure you will even have customers? What features in your product are they most concerned with? Why would they choose your product over a competitors? Are there even any competitors yet, or are you establishing a new market? Which companys could potentially become competitors?
A sales executive would probably be more useful at this point. Establish some channel partners, and get the product out there. Then hire a PR firm to get your name into the right industry rags. They will also work on some graphics you can do for print ads and websites. At this point, since you decided to go on your own vision rather than do marketing you're pretty much just need some PR consultants to send out whatever message you decided on already.
look at the drug companies. most drugs these days are made by small biotech and start up drug companies. Pfizer and others do marketing, manufacture and anything else that takes a lot of money.
same with tech. Flash IO licenses their products to HP and others who rebrand it, sell and support it.
or better yet, find a buyer and sell your company. google is always buying startups and integrating their products. some years google buys dozens of small companies
Read about Customer Development at Steve Blank blog.
An Angel investor can also help you with business connections and hiring the right person to do it.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
I've spent the last 7 years in marketing. The idea that the field is non-technical is just silly. Analytics drives the business. It's not enough to create interesting and compelling creative. You have to be able to be able to show a real lift from that test and use that data to drive future campaigns.
There are a lot of smart people in marketing. Both technical and non-technical. The argument that the field is largely non-technical and therefore some how foreign to you is both wrong and unimportant.
What you should focus on is hiring people who understand the field and can use, shape, and sell your mass marketing product. In other words this challenge is the same as any other business, learning how to successfully grow your business.
why find an "angle" investor? that is just one more thing to go wrong. Whether you hire an outside marketing consultant or hire a marketing employee, they answer, with an investor, you answer to them. Worse, you give away part of your company. It is just one more thing to go wrong. Better to devise a marketing plan with a limited budget.
Without knowing anything about the product or market, it is difficult for anyone to give meaningful advice. So here's a few books to consider that might bring you up to speed. Your job will be to find these on Amazon, etc. You might not DIY, but it will give you insights into marketing and help you identify someone who will help. Think of it like a businessman who takes a programming course to better understand programmers and work effectively with them. There are lots of bad marketing people, and you need to know enough to be able to identify the good ones from the bad one.
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries & Jack Trout - Start here.
Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson, Houghton Mifflin. - a how-to book on marking with a tiny budget. More local than national.
Advertising is a Waste of Money by Robert Ranson, HRD Press. Before you spend a dime advertising, read this.
Marketing Without Advertising, by Michael Phillips & Salli Rasberry, Nolo Press.
Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy, Vintage Books. In short - all marketing needs a feedback system so you can measure results. Yeah - web sites are great for this. Based on this book, I had a bunch of 1-800 toll-free phone numbers and every mailer had a different number. I could look at the phone bill and know which mailer was generating results. It is more important to know that something worked than to know why.
Place nail here >+
I have experience in another industry with the same scenario; I provide the operational expertise and oversight, and have marketing side opposite me. This was a very tough issue for me, as I know marketing is crucial for me from an operational standpoint, but I don't have the time or the drive to smile all day and shake hands.
I initially partnered with some marketing folks, where we were going to go halves on the costs, they were the marketing side, and I was the operational side. Their funding backed out after I had a lot of sunk costs (naturally), so I used whatever support they could still give me based on the good-will of our intended relationship, while I worked with people familiar to the market.
The most important advice I can give you is to work with people that already know the customers in your strongest base. As you appear to have experience in the area you're working in, the people who market for you should optimally know many of the same customers you do, know more about them, and know many more people you don't.
The second most important advice I can give you, is incentives for your salespeople. My initial partners had a strong incentive (if we did poorly, they lost money too). My new folks are rewarded for the increased business, and I feel that marketing folks you employ should make very low salaries in set income, with the ability to make more than you make in bonuses if they are wildly successful. Structures on this vary, but always do a reality check when you negotiate them; a smart salesperson is one that makes a small fortune making you a bigger one. A smart con artist makes themselves a small fortunes while you make about the same you would have without them.
I have mod points, but this is already going high enough, so I'm going to add my $0.02 to this. The company I work for has a great marketing department and they do a great job. That being said, they tell us every opportunity that they get that word of mouth is the best marketing that we have available.
We actually have people who check certain forums and do their best to make us aware of issues that crop up on these forums, and then we bend over backwards to make sure that the customer's issue gets resolved. Unless they're just bent out of shape because we couldn't do something that was basically impossible (although we're pretty good at that too...).
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Find a so-called "angel investor". They'll want an equity share, which is good at this point: their pay is tied to their performance. They should come with business background, a big network, and hopefully a couple of battle scars.
he's got a product, fledgling, sort of meaning it's already developed and viable - THE FUCK DOES HE NEED AN ANGEL INVESTOR FOR? he needs perhaps a partner marketing investor - a sales guy. he'd be better off with a sales guy with tied pay from sales.
ok, angel investors are sort of the same thing as a partner - but practically, no.
they're "angels" because you don't see them often and they don't do things often and he apparently needs a decent fulltime sales manager.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
He did have capital letters there, they were all just concentrated to the middle of the text. ;)
There's a huge difference between sales and marketing - engineers commonly don't recognize this.
Sales is all about the tactical - one deal at a time.
For the super simple version, I like to tell people that "Marketing" is creating a need for your product, and "Sales" is filling that need.
Sometimes there's already a need out there (e.g. spreadsheets) and the marketing is more about creating awareness. Other times (e.g. colored sugar water in a fancy bottle) the marketing does a lot more to create the need.
I've watched and experienced many times that for tech people, making a cool, useful product that didn't exist before is much easier than getting people to see it, find it, and buy it.
This. The same way that we get pissed off when an idea person wants someone to "just" program for them, techies need to learn that marketing -- good marketing -- is actually hard and requires some skill. Sales and marketing are not just bullshit and pretty pictures and booze and blow and hookers and sheeple.
If marketing were easy, and if Apple's success were due only to marketing (as is so often claimed), then their success would be easy to replicate, right? The fact is, neither of those statements is true.
Good marketing is not something you can just add to a product after the fact. Like good design, it has to be thought of throughout. I highly recommend you spend an hour watching this. In that talk, he was specifically addressing programmers.
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