Ask HN: Do You Despise Marketing?

42 points by vinteruggla 5 years ago | 40 comments

Ok maybe ‘despise’ is a strong word but i still feel there is something irreconcilable in a solo dev’s SaaS and the promotion (s)he has to make to have a chance at earning some money from it.

You and I both scoff at pushy newsletters, influencers, affiliate links, even SEO - which by the way made majority of web unreliable. Yet i know this is the only way to have a try at this attractive idea of working for yourself and introducing a tiny bit more freedom to your life (or is it?).

Then leave it to the pros you say? 9to5 looks just as unattractive.

eaandkw 5 years ago |

I think I despise marketing. For one marketers and spam calls have basically made me put my phone in airplane mode permantely, only allowing people in my contacts to get thru. I am getting close to the point of getting rid of my cell phone. If I get unsolicited emails I set up a rule to send them straight to the trash can. Mostly I am getting tired of every single interaction with a person or technology being used or designed to extract information or money. Don't get me wrong. I am willing to buy things. I just don't want to have to spend X amount of dollars for the rest of my life.

vb6sp6 5 years ago | |

I don't think "marketing" is to blame here.

Spam never seems to lead to a legitimate businesses (having to unsubscribe from legitimate newsletters and such is annoying)

And lots of products and services seem to want to extract data and money, but that also feels like it is a result of "product" departments, not the marketing departments.

I do agree with your overall sentiment: It is really annoying to do business with lots of companies out there.

paulcole 5 years ago | |

> I think I despise marketing

He posted on a site that’s fundamentally a marketing campaign for a venture capital fund.

eaandkw 5 years ago | | |

You know, I've never looked at it that way. But your probably right. Maybe I do like commercials after all.

At least it is unsolicited.

gwbrooks 5 years ago |

Done correctly, marketing is the act of giving value (usually in the form of information or opportunity) in order to capture value. It's reciprocal at the most basic level.

Unfortunately, too many folks have figured out that they can strip mine the audience by minimizing or ignoring the first half of that transaction.

I can't really despise marketing since I've spent 30 years in and out of it. But I can damn well despise bad, selfish marketing that doesn't even try to deliver any value.

doonesbury 5 years ago | |

Totally agree. If you've got something to say, and have some real value marketing is legit and darn helpful and a strategic need.

Of course without the preconditions marketing and sales sounds like a BS exercise of desperate come on.

semicolonandson 5 years ago |

Sure it would be nicer if good products were automatically successful on their merits alone. But the world is a very, very big place. Therefore a major part of the problem resting on your shoulders as a business owner is getting your product into the attention spheres of people who will pay for it.

IMO it's better not to fight realities you can't change. The best you can do — from both a business and a mental standpoint — is accept that marketing is a necessity and find a way to enjoy it.

I'm a programmer who's been indie for 10 years and I treat marketing as a series of open-ended experiments; this arouses my intellectual curiosity. I also gamify it by gathering real-time stats; this emulates the dopamine hit I get when a piece of code compiles.

I've vlogged and blogged a good bit about marketing from a programmer perspective, so if you'd like more on my take, check the links in my profile.

codingdave 5 years ago |

I dislike that people think that landing pages and good copy == marketing. Those are tools that sometimes apply to good marketing, but marketing itself is just getting the right message to the right people. That can be honest communication, just saying that you have a product that solves a problem. It doesn't have to be a landing page... it doesn't even have to be online. Talking is marketing. Radio is marketing. Print is marketing. Conference booths, giving out business cards, sharing your story.

Even online, your web site / landing page are not your marketing... they are where your marketing sends people to convert them into leads to hand-off to sales.

If there is anything I do despise, it is the attitude of "If you build a landing page, they will come."

XCSme 5 years ago | |

The thing is that you should indeed start with the landing page, as it makes it a lot easier to define your target audience, message, benefits, etc. Also, it isn't really worth bringing customers to a landing page that looks awful, as you might lose a lot of customers that you manage to bring at your door step just by showing a low quality website, even though your product might be good. I think it's about 50-50 the importance of on-page optimizations and off-page marketing. I also think it's about 70% product and 30% marketing.

sharps_xp 5 years ago |

If we didn’t have things like copy writing, influencers, and landing pages, we’d be worse off. I empathize that marketing can sometimes feel borderline manipulation but ultimately the market will test you and your product to see if it lives up to what’s said/written.

if we didn’t have marketing, we’d have a discoverability problem for which alternative solutions would probably have the same issues as marketing.

jeromescuggs 5 years ago | |

i mulled over this for a minute because i can't really find fault with your comment, but at the same time i look at the state of things and it seems far from ideal, or even acceptable.

my guess is there's a factor that affects the system you described: centralization. it's something i think about alot when i sort of try to look back and remember how i stayed on top of so much content back in the pre-web-2.0 times. i remember something like you describe - lotta reading copy, sure, and landing pages definitely, but the huge difference in my mind is how 'influencers' were more of a complex ecosystem of people who just sort of passed interesting links to other people. i dunno.

mkbkn 5 years ago | |

Off-topic but by any chance are you hiring copywriters or want to A/B test new leads?

CM30 5 years ago |

No, because I believe you need it if you want your work/product/service seen and used by others. Relying on pure word of mouth doesn't work, especially not in the kind of timeframe needed for a company to stay solvent.

I also feel SEO gets an unfairly bad rap. Sure, it has been abused by dodgy sites, and those sites have indeed hurt Google's search results... but many strategies in white hat SEO basically boil down to 'write/create content people want and get it in front of them in logical ways'. A lot of times, good SEO and good usability/accessibility/design go hand in hand, since most of the things that help a site rank also tend to help the user as well.

bberenberg 5 years ago |

I am not sure I understand where you're coming from. Is your issue that it takes more than building a good product to get people to buy it? Do you wish you could build it and they would come? This is a fantasy that some people subscribe to, and that I have failed to hit repeatedly. In fact, I would say whenever I enter into building anything with this mindset, it's the biggest red flag of impending failure. There is a difference between being an engineer and being a product maker. You wouldn't expect a baker to be an amazing cook even though they both make food would you? If you want to be an engineer without the 9/5 and without the headache of marketing / sales, get a cofounder.

jdmoreira 5 years ago |

I absolutely despise marketing, sales and advertisement. The reason is simple, they are in the business of making you feel bad with what you've got and try to sell you something to momentarily make you feel better. And let's not forget how much better the planet would be if we didn't buy garbage and took unnecessary vanity trips.

I believe the world would be a much better place without magazines, billboards, etc.

Regarding your SaS... you should definitely not engage in unnecessary conversion emails because developers also hate that.

vbrandl 5 years ago | |

The first two paragraphs sound as if you'd love "99 francs" (novel or movie, the movie captures the novel quite well IMO). It's about the topic of marketing and advertisement from the perpective of a creative producing advertisements (with lots of drama and sex for the story)

jdmoreira 5 years ago | | |

Thanks for the recommendation will definitely give it a try

he11ow 5 years ago |

I don't to if this applies specifically to you, but I noticed that for a lot of people, the "hate" for marketing is a really a disguise for fear.

In practically every industry, marketers are slightly looked down at, and it's only when people face the need to do it themselves they realize just how hard the act of winning hearts and minds is.

Sure, there're a million and one cheap hacks, but the gulf between them and actually winning the love of an audience is huge. And we never one the cheap attention, right? We want the real thing: true appreciation of the value of whatever product or service you're building.

That's the only thing that wins loyalty, that's the thing Kevin Kelley was thinking about when he wrote "1000 True Fans".

So people want the fans, but to win them you have to get consistent at communicating value. And since many developers don't take pride in communication, and it's not a skill they've previously cultivated, it can easily feel just like you described, an exorbitant burden.

At some point in my life I realized that the one hard skill standing between me and working for myself long term is marketing. I made a conscious decision to desert any willful ignorance on my part and genuinely make and effort. I'm glad I did.

ssss11 5 years ago |

I dont like advertising, if I am interested in something, thats upon me to research it.

I dont mind marketing per se, if Ive sought you out, so long as the information is truth and not fluffy lies. Dont track me or try to profile me without consent.

The point I think you’re getting at is how to generate an income, my opinion is forget freemium/ads and ask people to pay. This is the only way out of the current privacy shitshow.

codegeek 5 years ago |

I despised it because I sucked at it but as a SAAS founder, I realize that without good marketing, business will die. So I stopped hating it and am in a mission to take it head on which means learn, learn, learn.

Ok, no one wants pushy newsletters, influences and all that crap. But if done right, they also work to an extent. However, the most critical aspects of marketing are things like copywriting, landing pages (in SAAS world), good organic content that is researched and is specifically for your target audience (good SEO) etc.

If you are a founder, you cannot leave it all to pros especially early on. You need to learn some basics and go from there. I was on the hunt for that special digital marketing massiah for my company for a while when I finally realized that I need to learn more first before I go find that magical person.

errantspark 5 years ago |

Yes. It's an annoying negative sum game we all have to play or spent enormous amounts of effort avoiding.

sebastien_bois 5 years ago |

So it's more a question of "Do you despise having to market yourself/your product"?

XCSme 5 years ago |

I don't despise marketing in general, just marketing done for the sake of marketing. For example I hate blog posts that are create purely for SEO purposes.

Personally I just can't start marketing my product, even though I think it's one of the best in its space (analytics). The reason: I want to be sure it's the best, otherwise I would feel that I am just tricking people into buying an inferior product (which is what most marketing does nowdays, trick people into buying lower quality products for more money).

I think product should precede marketing. First make something great, then let people know about it. Build something truly better and only after that let the world know. Don't trick people into buying shitty products.

vbrandl 5 years ago | |

In general there is nothing wrong with marketing an interior product. It may be cheaper or more promising than the market leader but the customer is still able to decide for themselves. That said, it gets bad as soon as you market something your product doesn't offer (e.g. lie)

XCSme 5 years ago | | |

Well, just look at all the teleshopping ads. They do all the dramatization, with complex stories and inventing problems you don't actually have, and then comes the amazing product that efficiently solves this horrendous problem. They are not lying about what the product does, but they are lying about how it will actually affect your life. This also happens to most of the "self-improvement" books that promise you that you will get rich in 7 days, out of which the last 3 you can just spend to get a 6-pack. The idea is that a product "could" affect your life in a specific way, but it most likely won't in the way it's advertised.

pryelluw 5 years ago |

I despise bad marketing. I love and support good marketing. How to tell them apart? Good marketing is about providing value with postive intent. Bad marketing is just plain manipulation.

Hacker news itself (as a product) is an excellent example of marketing a tech product.

doonesbury 5 years ago |

I despise marketing and politics insofar as how it's done: lying, picking very narrow talking points without acknowledging the larger context and contradictions it comes with.

Marketing is what you do you don't have to hard sell: the customer comes in pretty convinced already. Sales esp. cold calling and hard selling is another matter and you do with no or bad marketing.

As usual anything that started good becomes severely distorted in the hands of the wrong people. Listen to a pitch from or discussion of marketing from Berkshire&H, AMD, Motorola, Broderbund sure. But listening to amway, a direct marketer, or Enron no thank you.

jeromescuggs 5 years ago |

Given the replies I think it would be wise to instead perhaps use a different term to distinguish it from the sort of area bill hicks was known to loathe. A term i used to see used back in the day was 'shameless self promotion'.

Personally, 'despise' is perfectly descriptive. Fortunately I've always done dev-related stuff as a tinkerer's hobby, unfortunately my discomfort at shameless self-promotion will likely mean I won't be quitting my day job anytime soon.

type0 5 years ago |

I despise deceptive marketing

XCSme 5 years ago | |

Not only deceptive, but marketing that just promotes mediocre or bad products for premium prices.

Oh, and also, marketing for things/services you don't actually need, that just try to convince you that their thing is indispensible for your life.

heresie-dabord 5 years ago |

It is a category of false information. I block it.

HeyLaughingBoy 5 years ago |

Not at all. I'm not very good at it, but I really like the process of marketing. It's like a fun puzzle to figure out ways for people to find out about/buy the things I build.

March_f6 5 years ago |

When you consider how much human and financial capital is put into it, yes. Doubly so when you add to that how much human and financial capital is put into dodging it.

meiraleal 5 years ago |

Yes. It creates over-consumption and wrong kind of optimization that is not around the product but the reach of the ad.

Gibbon1 5 years ago |

Marketing has a light side and a dark side.

Light side: Closing the loop between what the customer thinks they want, what they need, when they need it. And what the company can provide. Being able to sooth over differences and work out conflicts. Done correctly everyone benefits.

Dark side: If you don't use our feminine hygiene spray your husband's going to leave you.

nikolastojkov 5 years ago |

I hate programming yet still program 9to5.

awillen 5 years ago |

I used to think of salespeople as slimeballs who would lie, cheat and steal to push something over on you. Any time anyone would try to sell me anything, I'd immediately become defensive and just get out of the conversation as quickly as possible.

Then I became an enterprise SaaS PM and started working on the other side of things with some really fantastic sales reps. I came to understand that, as with all jobs, there's a tremendous amount of variance in the quality of sales reps, and the good ones are actually really good. A great sales rep is an expert on her market and has a breadth of knowledge about the problems people face related to the product she's selling. She's not trying to push something you don't need; rather, she's trying to understand exactly what your problem is and help to resolve it. Obviously she's being compensated in the process, but a great sales rep selling a good product isn't going to waste time trying to foist that product on people who don't need it when she could spend her time much more productively.

A recent example of a time I really appreciated being sold to: I was looking for someone with conversion rate optimization expertise to redesign my ecommerce site, and I posted a job on Upwork. I got a lot of quotes and spoke to a few of the ones that sounded the best, and the third guy I spoke to really took the time to understand my goals, my company and my financial situation. Instead of trying to sell me a $5000 redesign of the site, he said for $350 he would review my analytics, ads and site itself and offer feedback on how to improve it from a CRO perspective. That was exactly what I wanted, but I just didn't know it was a thing. I didn't need to pay someone $5k to do a redesign - I just got a premium Shopify template and implemented it myself, and it looks great. I was really just looking for CRO advice, and because he had the domain expertise and took the time to understand my business, he was able to offer the right solution. That's what a great sales rep does.

Marketing is very much the same. A lot of it sucks because people take the shotgun approach of spamming everyone everywhere all the time and hoping a few people buy what they're selling. That doesn't mean marketing is bad, though. Once I was trying to figure out what to buy my girlfriend for Christmas, and an ad appeared on Facebook for a behind the scenes tour of the red panda exhibit at the SF Zoo. Unfortunately we broke up right before Christmas, so I ended up going with one of my buddies, but it would've been the perfect gift! That's what good marketing is - finding the right person at the right time and solving a problem.

So yeah, a lot of marketing sucks, but that doesn't mean you have to do sucky marketing. Instead of trying to play SEO games, you can just write really high quality content on relevant topics that will actually help people and make them see you as an expert. You can use influencers as a channel to reach the appropriate set of folks for your product, who will be happy to have it. There's lots of ways to market well, and I encourage you to figure out the ones that work for you before dismissing the whole concept.

Seriously, I do hope you figure it out. If you have a great product that will help people, it deserves to be marketed.

6510 5 years ago |

I suggest we make it illegal. To remedy the problem a government website is created. Everyone who has anything for sale MUST list it there including prices and give everyone in the country, regardless who they are, the opportunity to buy it. If your potential customer doesn't know he needs your product it may be carefully described in a machine readable way, critically examined for a fee and listed as a suggestion for the prospects. If they desire it customers may create a detailed profile full of personal information (that will be guarded carefully) The suggestions are ordered by scale of promotion. If you successfully game the system and properly describe the exploit a large bounty will be be paid.

6510 5 years ago | |

To pick the best product or service one would have to first know which exist. Further data can be gathered after this. Individually we might be happy to pick some random crap and pay to much for it. Collectively it has huge implications. You get an expensive world build out of useless crap. A market in private and personal data has even more terrifying implications. Genocide might not even be the worse. It can and probably will (for some it already is) become a slow torture device that excludes no one.

I politely thank you for silently disapproving of my opinion since I couldn't have made the point better myself.