How to outsource marketing for your side project

I don't think it'd be very effective. Running the marketing and seeing what works is a critical feedback loop for finding product market fit. Someone who can do that on your behalf is probably expensive. You could probably find somebody to do social media or whatever for you, but there's no guarantee that's the most effective channel and, again, if you don't have product market fit you'd be shoveling money into a firepit.

If you have product market fit i.e. you know exactly what your product is and who your customers are (which can take months to years), you may outsource it afterwards. However until then, you will be wasting money.

There is no shortcut to this. If you want to create recurring income (no matter how small), you have to work your ass off yourself initially. You need to learn how to find initial customers yourself. If you cannot, it's most likely game over. You cannot just build a cool side project and expect it to magically find customers using outsourcing. No such thing. Now, you could find someone else to help you with skin in the game but then that's different. You still need to get a few customers yourself in the beginning.

So initially, the goal is to find your first 1-10 paying customers yourself. In the process of doing that, you will learn a lot about the product and the market. You will then adjust things. Anything else is premature and you will just get burnt with the outsourced marketing crowds that are plenty.

That’s a thing people do! I can help you through my company D2Cgroup.ca.

In the same way you don't outsource sales at the start, you definitely don't want to outsource marketing.

Figure out what problems people are facing, explain how to solve those problems. Eventually you create processes for this, and can delegate.

(N.B.: I've done over a half dozen startups, and exited two of them, but didn't make much.)

Yes, this is possible, but really, if done correctly (and most of the time, it's not), getting a good marketing strategy and plan in place and successfully executing it is the hardest part of getting a startup going. As the CTO/technology guy in all those startups, it pains me to admit that, but it's true - the biz part is way harder than the technology/product part in almost all cases. The biz side challenges are responsible for way more of my gray/lost hair than building awesome products...)

If you already know who your customers are, how to identify them, and have at least a clue how to reach them, then outsourcing this is more straightforward. If you don't, and especially if you don't have any marketing chops yourself, you'll definitely need to learn enough to not get taken advantage of, and then hire someone to help do that for you. Early/existing traction with PAYING customers is a big help here.

Dynamitejobs.co is one good place to find such people, but be aware that even hiring remote workers in another country may not be all that cheap, and you're making a commitment that's right up there with taking on a key employee or cofounder.

(FWIW, I plan to do this next year, once my new startup is off the ground, and flowing enough cash to pay for remote team I'll need. Interestingly, this is a small automated mfg play, and almost all the software dev (much of what I'll want to outsource) can wait until we're making money.)

Yes, sometimes it's possible. Sometime ago, I had considered doing it because I could not think like a marketing person. So, I told a struggling startup founder that I will do grunt marketing for them, they just have to teach me the steps involved. Now, after learning , I concluded that for every problem,, by and large,, there is already an imperfect solution. It's easier to approach the solution maker to market their product and rather than build myself, one from scratch If you want someone, you should atleast drop your contact details here, so that we can contact you.

There are numerous "marketing consultants" (just check your local yellow pages) who are happy to take your money and do marketing for you. The problem is that you would be outlaying several thousand dollars up front for an uncertain return. Marketing does not equal sales!

I've never had much luck with outsourcing dev or marketing

Prob mainly because I only wanted to spend relatively small amounts

A grand a month for dev

Less for marketing

I always thought there would be people out there like me when I was younger

Hustling picking up side work on Craigslist

Often for very little money

I still think there is a way

Maybe it's just finding the right provider

I've always imagined a upwork-for-indie-hackers marketplace that provides services at some fixed rate like $5/hr, and all the money has to flow through a single payment gateway so that everyone gets paid

In theory this is what upwork and fiver and the rest already do

Minus the revenue share

Ideally it'd be revenue share and equity share over time

That's part of my motivation for most things I have ever tried to do -- find some mutually beneficial situation

I don't know what it's like for the contractor who have done work for me

Do they think I'm too cheap? Or just suck? Or I'm just a contract and if it doesn't work then onto the next one?

For my part, I often or always get work that does not work

So right now I have an app I need fixed but I don't want to go back to the dude who did it for various reasons

So my execution is shit

I've learned but it's gd expensive to learn

Before you outsource, I suggest you figure out the following:

- Value proposition. What's your unique advantage?

- Target market. Is it a new segment of an existing market? An existing segment? Mass market? Don't worry about age groups, but know who is best for the problem and solution.

- Revenue model. Freemium? Microtransactions? Licensing? Ads?

- Customer relationship. Do you need to build trust? Do they need an explanation/demo? Community? Will they buy In my previous startup, they won't buy directly from advertisers, but will buy from a third party blog talking about the app. If you're making a database, they might need to see it used in production by a big company, and test it with a hackathon.

You'll have to figure this out first, then scale. If you outsource too early, they will drag your business to pivot to their marketing expertise and it might not even work. For example, selling a database or analytics tools through FB ads wouldn't be ideal even if they reach the right customers.

Yes, it's called celebrity endorsements and expect to give up 70% or more of the revenue. That celebrity will then pretend that it was their idea and that they built it and you're just a tiny helper who assisted them with their grand product vision.

It feels a bit stupid to give up the bragging rights, but in exchange you're fully shielded from those pesky customers.

In the same boat with zlipa.com

I believe it's got potential, marketing however is my weak spot (pathetically blowing my own horn just now serves as proof).

The main issue with hiring an agency to do marketing is that your incentives are not aligned.

They almost always charge based on your marketing spend. Which means it's in their interest to make you spend as much as possible. They are only rarely willing to base a part of their compensation on your conversions. And often that's only structured as a bonus.

They are never willing to base on it CAC.

So, you often end up in a situation with thousands in ad spend that is basically useless.

That's what I've been struggling with as well. I know I need to learn to do it myself but it's quite time consuming.

You clearly didn't get the memo. You don't outsource the business side. The business side outsources you!

The only way I have ever heard of people doing this successfully is to kinda cheat. Get a co-founder who has strong marketing skills and just as much ownership as you.

It's not technically outsourcing, but it does remove the task from you directly, and gives it to someone far better suited for it, with properly-aligned incentives.

Plus, would you rather have 50% of something, or 0% of nothing?

Better than marketing? Sales.

Much more at small things.

I have a partnership with a friend, it take care of sale stuff. The deal is simply: I get X and he can sell more than it as he please.

A good salesman will instantly see how much nice the deal is! (btw: I know all his deals and customers: I host them. We were before partners in our first and failed startup and split to make things leaner and flexible - not more cost for office and all that-, and have worked for us)

Other very simply, is get % off the sale. Most I know work like that, and prefer it to a salary.

You need a co-founder with marketing experience. You do not want to outsource, because you need alignment of incentives and a person to reflect and iterate upon the entire business model.

If you decide that you are looking for a co-founder, HN will be the perfect place to pitch your project and describe what exactly you are looking for.

EDIT: I might actually be interested myself depending on the nature of your project.

The problem is that a part of the marketing endeavor requires investment namely media budget (assuming that the entity you're outsourcing to will have copy/design skills).

You can go through the route of organic reach, but that takes time to build.

Locking a deal based on revenue share might be a good way to top things off. But unless you have an extremely good product I don't see people up-fronting budget for anyone's project.

Remember that in the end it will depend on the product/service... if the value isn't there, you can have the best marketing but things won't happen.

So I think the answer is, it's too risky.

>I'm sitting on a - what I believe to be - cool side project that should be capable of generating some recurring income

This sentence could be made by a marketing guy, pitching to find a dev to build it. Same goes the other way around.

Does your product target consumers or businesses? Consumer marketing (B2C) is very different than business-to-business marketing (B2B). Frankly, I find B2B much easier and more ethical than B2C.

Most agencies charge you an hourly rate with no incentive to win. You can sometimes negotiate performance-based incentives or % of sales, but it's a bit rare. Both of these can actually bring in more money for the vendor and you're not giving up equity.

Source: I'm a B2B marketing technology consultant.

I have done some marketing outsourcing and after my experience i would not recommend it. Incentives are definitely not aligned. They charged fixed fees for services that i felt didn’t add any value but increased costs, they used up significant quantities of our time. One time while looking into why we weren’t seeing conversions i noticed there was some incorrect configs on some adgroups. A whole months budget blown in a few hours. No apologies, it was an accident. I still had a invoice from them at the end of that month. If I hadn’t dug in I don’t think they would have been forthcoming with it. Our CAC was impossibly high and in the end I struggled to see the value, i also had no control and was loosing trust. There is also the problem that marketers tend to be good talkers and they always had something to say about the results (agree they had to do this with the pandemic going on). Our budget was mid-level five figures which should have yielded some value but we have ditched all the services they setup for us (it was not done very well) and we’ve chosen new tools. For example they put us on Hubspot we have just shifted to a few replacement tools. If you do go ahead remember marketing effort is difficult to price you are paying todays income for future revenue. The results from your marketing outsourcing agency will only be known after 3-12 months. Marketing like DevOps should be a core capability of any business. You might be able to do it but it will be better via a consultant not an agency. You have more control then.

I have worked in marketing on both the agency and the client side.

This is absolutely something you can do. Freelancers are out there and so are agencies. Agencies are expensive and, in my opinion, are best for specific campaigns, not for long term management of all of your marketing efforts.

You need to find a business partner that knows marketing and that you can trust. They should ask lots of good question about your product and they should clearly be able to explain to you the why and how of what they are doing. If they can’t or you feel like you don’t understand what they are saying, they are probably not a good fit for you.

If Marketing is essential part of your business, then you could add that person as a partner. There is abundant supply of marketing professionals in the market.

However if you just want to outsource marketing, there are marketing agencies who can do that work for you. However, there are few things that you must keep in mind.

1. Sign an NDA and a proper contract

2. Make sure your contract has important provisions on price, price increases cap every year, performance measurement and penalties, SLAs

3. Depending upon, whether what the vendor has access to, you may need to ensure that they are compliant with privacy laws in the country where your customers are. PIPEDA in Canada, HIPPA, COPPA in US, GDPR in Europe, etc.

4. Have the vendor purchase sufficient insurance policies to cover for cyber breaches and other forms of losses arising because of this arrangement.

5. If they have access to confidential information including customer and employee PII, Make sure they have sufficient technology controls in place to protect your information.

I am not a lawyer, i am sharing this based on my experience. You should hire a lawyer to draft a full contract.

> Does anyone have experience with outsourcing this somehow?

Its very common. Marketing consultants and agencies abound.

> I'm thinking someone who'd do social media and promotion and we'd collaborate on a revenue share model of sorts.

These types of agreement exist but in my experience they tend have mixed results. It works OK in an affiliate enviroment, typically business models that have 1) a quick interest to sale window and 2) One of these two factors i) high conversion or ii) high value payouts. For example credit cards do well in affiliate environments but home loans (while they exist) dont get the same affiliate interest as there is a much higher research to purchase ratio and then proving you had a hand in that purchase decision etc.

If your business suits affiliate style results, then someone can work on promoting something and see fairly fast results. Also note social marketing can have a long term requirement to gain traction. In the partners interest they should want some ongoing claim to revenue/profit or for them its best to set up a independent site and build an audience, then direct said audience to a product. That way they retain value for the lag effect of their work. So if you want someone to do this for your website, they might spend 6-12 months working their ass off building a supply of organic people then you give them the flick now its actually bringing revenue in. Huge risk for them to take.

I think in this situation the 3 better and fairer options:

1) Pay someone for their work and you take on the cost risk as the business owner.

2) Bring in a true partner and give them a share of the business.

3) Go to the affiliate marketing enviroment and get a clear pay for performance model set up. If going down this route be careful in it doesn't suit all product and there some really shonky people in this space. It can be one of the most successful channels for the right business and model. Also people can do their dough if they dont know their ins/outs and sign up to poor terms.

Overall: yes this is a thing people do. Try to look at it form both sides and set up a fair solution vs trying to get someone to work cheap. HN is full of comments of people trying to get developers to work on a product for some mythical long term payout, this is no different.