Build it and they will come is the biggest lie
Why that saying ever became real part of the English lexicon I'll never know.
What's the best way to outsource the job of marketing your new tool you hack together?
Why that saying ever became real part of the English lexicon I'll never know.
What's the best way to outsource the job of marketing your new tool you hack together?
I agree, paying customers won't just find you because you build a good product. However, like many folks on here I lean more towards building than marketing, it just comes to me more naturally.
To lean in towards my strengths, I do the following and it works well for me:
There is NO way to outsource marketing and get great results.
If you have a big budget and can get top talents, it is possible.
Is it relevant to the topic starter? I doubt.
What do you mean? I don't quite understand.
I mean the topic started may not have a big budget so your opinion is not relevant to him.
I agree that the poster most likely doesn't have a budget marketing budget, like most of the indiehackers. Most indiehackers are not great marketers, so most do not have much success with doing marketing on their own. I agree with you that it would be difficult to outsource marketing and get great result. But outsourcing is not the problem. It is getting the right talent/resource to do the marketing.
It is kinda from the Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams. Which, in my opinion, shows how great storytelling could affect the culture in a non-reversible way.
Although, I will say, that saying is true. But only if you can solve the "information distribution" problem. Meaning that you need to communicate to "them" that "it" exists and solves the problem that keeps them awake at night. Which is practically marketing communications.
(This is an oversimplification in every possible way, though.)
Integration partnerships. Integrate into another platform as another tier of service. Essentially, they are doing the sales and marketing for you.
Think about outsourcing social and blog posts as well as that content pays dividends down the road.
Both of these are down the road from a discovery and early product/market fit though.
That's a rather interesting approach - it worked for Facebook in reverse, too. Facebook built what they called "the platform" in around 2007 and enabled hundreds, thousands and now, perhaps, millions of apps of various kinds (games, quizzes, plugins etc).
Another equally interesting approach is Discord. You can literally build enormous infrastructure on the backbone of Discord servers that provide you with access to millions of users, and if your solution has a mass appeal, it will be adopted by many Discord servers.
Do you have any additional examples you'd like to share, in addition to mine? :)
Sure, we've done cross promotional integrations where we simply create ads for other partners on our site, in our social feeds, in our newsletters, in our sign-up confirmation emails, and even our subscription receipts.
Since we built an integration platform that is a service, we use the same service dynamics and architecture to power our mobile app and reporting as we do to to provide widgets into other platforms.
And, while we don't have a web platform, someone recently used tools to port our mobile app to deaptop (kind of took us by surprise, we weren't expecting that).
We've even offered our services as white label or as different revenue models for customers for distribution.
I like the idea of integrating with different dev platforms like Facebook or discord, but we haven't had the need to do this yet. Those are both really good ideas you propose for the eight use cases. They leverage network effects of the existing network. However, the idea of social sharing the content (and by extension, the value) you provide as a feature in your product is another great way to leverage network effects from existing users.
I doubt it's possible to outsource marketing without spending huge amount of money. Marketing is arguably even more important than actual development.
Generally I agree with you, but to play devil's advocate, sometimes customers don't know what they want until they see it. And often it's the minor things about a product that really gets them over the line, so imo you need to have some sort of vision/solution for them when talking to them.
As for how to outsource.... I don't know honestly. Google ads for your main keywords?
Your right, sometimes people just don't realize what they need until they see it. The best example of this imo is an iphone, until then people weren't sure what a great experience could be. Sometime you need to believe in what your building and assume people will enjoy it once they understand it.
Actually I don't think that's a good example. The iPhone wasn't "build it and they will come". While it has been one of the greatest products out there, it still had a huge marketing behind it.
IMO the term "just build it and they will come" refers to the idea that if something is good enough, you won't have to market it. Which is most likely to be completely false.
I don't think this was about "Build it and they will come". And yes, "build it and they will come" is total nonsense as I have built so many products and still, none are generating revenue even after posting about them here and launching Twayobiz one twice on Product Hunt and finally getting featured with nothing happening.
Exactly. Another famous example is Henry Ford where he said if he had asked customers what they wanted, they'd have said "faster horses!"
haha building is for the control freaks among us. marketing feels like a hopeless endeavor sometimes (thoughts from an ex-marketer turned builder)
Hi @jatacid
What's the URL of your new product?
We now have 3,095 Volunteers (free help) from 72 countries. You can use them to acquire users, convert them and support them.
They will typically commit 1 hr+ per day for 3 months. They are in fact bringing users for our own product.
Check us out www.skilledup.life
If your product solves a problem, and if there are folks or companies with the same problem out there, then our Volunteers might be the answer you have been waiting for.
All the best.
Manoj
Sometimes™
Generally speaking it seems one of the biggest risks any indie hacker takes is making something no one needs and/or not having a way of letting their target market know about it.
But also, @zerotousers did a great job researching when There's One Acquisition Channel Where "Build it and They Will Come" Still Holds True . Platform app stores — especially the less crowded ones — can sometimes give organic traffic if that's where the target market tends to go when they need something.
I feel that in some sense, this is almost a corrollary of another piece of interesting advice that I read on here recently, which was , "don't try to build a community around your product, be part of a community and build a product for it." In this case, the "community" is people on that platform. Of course theres always exceptions to every rule but I thought that was an interesting perspective to consider.
It gets easier and you see both sides in harmony if you internalize the fact that your product is your marketing.
Why would you want to outsource the marketing of your new tool? Sure, if you're a builder/maker, marketing might not be your forte but speaking with your potential users might be one of the best things you can do to actually promote your tool.
If you present your work in a like-minded community to people who might enjoy it, you'll be able to gather their feedback and improve your product.
Then, with some luck, those early adopters will be advocate to your product. Which is kind of outsourcing your marketing.
Sometimes I think it makes to outsource the marketing to influencers or micro-influencers. This doesn't mean forking over thousands of dollars, but maybe spending a few hundred to see if they can promote your product over social media. Certain products can benefit from this style of marketing, but not all.
Overall, I agree with you. It's better to find where your users are interacting with each other and then embed yourself in their environment. Get their feedback, and try to create a conversation around your product.
A good example of this is RepostNetwork - they let Soundcloud artists repost their songs easily together in a network. I'd see them talking about Soundcloud and music all the time back in the day on Twitter and other sites, and it got some initial people interested in what they were doing. Eventually I heard about it too this way and in no time they started to become ubiquitous in the space.
FWIW
https://idiomorigins.org/origin/if-you-build-it-they-will-come
This comment was deleted 4 years ago