Ask HN: How do you handle marketing as a solo technical founder?
I've shipped multiple products over the past few years. Every single one followed the same pattern: build, post, get 12 likes from friends, a bit of organic traction, then nothing. Back to coding a new thing.
I know I need marketing help but giving equity to someone I met online feels like a huge risk. At the same time hiring a paid marketer when you have zero revenue feels just as scary. And I'm not dancing on TikTok, that's for sure.
Have any of you actually taken on a marketing co-founder? What made you say yes to that person specifically? Was it their track record, the way they pitched, a trial period first?
92 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadI brought on a high-touch salesperson on spec years ago and it did not work out. He and I were really successful at getting audiences with people but we never made the sales we were looking for and, worse, he lost me small cheap jobs that I could have sold myself. He'd probably say it was a product problem and he might have been right but later on I found out I wasn't the only person who had the same experience with him.
For some products you need those kind of skills. I've met people like him who really are worth their weight in gold.
For other products you need somebody who can make an Adwords campaign, analyzes the analytics, refine it and repeat. That kind of person can be worth their weight in gold too.
For this conversation to be productive you have to have some idea if you need one or the other or a bit of both.
In business, selling is much much much more important than making because if you have money you can hire technical workers. But nobody will care nearly as much about survival as you.
And if you have a technical background you are much more likely to have technical people in your network. Good luck.
I seriously wonder if that can happen today. As a technical founder, I have tried to find a marketing partner for years. Every time it has failed miserably as each one proved unable to move the needle.
In my case, it could be the product, but I wonder who has seen success in this day and age.
I'm actually building something about this, would love to stay in touch and share it with you when it's live. Might be exactly what you've been looking for.
In case you are interested to stay in touch, shoot me a message. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lazarbogosavljevic/)
Marketing comes later.
But it seems to me that there are many projects out there like mine. You start building something because it scratches an itch you have. You think it would be fun to build. You keep adding features and fine tuning the code because you want to see something work better and/or faster than anything else.
Then one day you look at it and say: "I wonder if other people will think this thing is as useful as I do (and be willing to pay something for it)?"
It might still be a work in progress, but it does a number of very useful things, so you now have to put on your marketing hat or team up with someone who is good at that.
This significantly reduces bounce rate compared to a traditional landing page and I've had good success getting to the top of popular search terms after a few months/years.
1. Don't give up after the first month of no traction, if you can get at least 1 customer at this stage that is a good sign.
2. Make contact with every customer you acquire, find out why they installed your product and what they want from it. Build any feature that they say is missing and offer the best customer support possible
3. Repeat this for a period of time. Once you have more customers the circumstances will change but this how you go from 0 -> 1 and get some runway IMO
It’s easy to get carried away building every request, especially with early adopters who likely aren’t actually invested yet but may be excited about their own vision for it.
My personal experience is that too much of it leads to the product becoming a sort of shapeless, unwieldy ooze. Or perfect for one customer and few others. Some things can be tough to undo later too, so you might end up supporting them a lot longer than you’d like.
When I first started, getting customer reviews was my north star, so i would add any feature and hide them under "advanced" if they were ridiculously long-tail. Still worth it for the review and positive experience even if you hide the feature...
I think the "Make contact with every customer" hits hard here. I think a bunch of people forget they you talk to people more.
Nothing to say, great advice.
I just launched something and the first few days have been quiet. Reading this made me decide to keep going.
Point 1 especially. Thank you.
I'm pretty sure my primary job is marketing the work that I do.
I found the only thing that reliably works is direct sales. Find people that could potentially use your product and message them. Find them in forums, chats, email, LinkedIn, wherever.
If I had something I was into or did and someone took the time to reach out to me to try to show me something they built in a personal way, I would definitely be receptive.
Online stuff is cheap. I built products, posted on Reddit and had literally thousands of people come to my site. Not one person bothered to go to the home page and ask "what is this product". And this was when there were a lot fewer bots and scrapers. No ones going to use your product because he saw some crap on TikTok. It's cheap engagement
I think I am definitely gonna try the direct sales approach, to try and fill out the platform once its ready.
Just like you, I developed a product and posted about it on Reddit, and received a ton of upvotes and comments in just over ten minutes. So I knew I was in the right place.
But then, moderators deleted my post cause they don't like promotion here.
I've tried X, youtube and other social medias. But it's like shouting in a crowded train station—no one can hear me.
So I think it's hard to harness the leverage of online marketing right from the start. Perhaps we should reach out to each customer one by one during the first phase.
You can't buy it if you have no idea it exists, right?
So how do you get the word out to the potential duatomers? You can read traction (the book), or just ask gemini/perplexity where you should advertise to find them.
Not universal for every product but for the right one it's a really clean distribution channel that compounds over time. The "make calls with users" part is universal though, that's the one I keep avoiding and probably shouldn't.
How long before the SEO started moving for you?
doesn't seem like you're risking much if your products are not getting any traction in the first place
In general, the answer usually is to find people in your own network. If you go by that funnel the first thing you need is a network. LI is great at this. The next thing is to see who in your network is worth talking to. Find out whether the pain-point that you recognized resonates with them. A LI blast to your network might work as well to give you a bit of credibility. One thing that is cited often that does NOT work is spamming people asking for their time to learn about a problem. Nobody ever got back to me wit this method. But asking people in your own network for warm intros almost always works.
Ourbit (ourbitapp.com) is still a work in progress (wrapping up the demo/assetes/characters).
BuzzBench is down but the repo is open and there's a demo video if you want to see what it did: github.com/LazarKap/buzzbench / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAnbZMoQvmQ.
Building something new right now that's directly about this problem, will share when it's live.
Next to this, I have like 3 more failed projects.
If I can help somehow, hit me up on linkedin, Il be glad. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lazarbogosavljevic/
> I know I need marketing help but giving equity to someone I met online feels like a huge risk.
No offense, but your equity, from your own admission, is literally worthless. If someone decides to help you out for your equity, you should be jumping for joy. Most likely you need to pay out of your pocket, but if you're not willing to risk your own capital, then how can you expect others to risk theirs?
Source: CS grad turned revenue person