Slashdot Mirror
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)
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.
He did have capital letters there, they were all just concentrated to the middle of the text. ;)