First time founders are obsessed with product. Second time founders are obsessed with distribution.
— Justin Kan, cited in Ask HN: I built it, nobody came, now what?
- say you're convinced, what does that mean?
- after all, a lot of ◊ marketing, especially ads, are a numbers game
- (see every Alex Hormozi book)
- ...and then how do you do it on the traditional ⋱ build a startup shoestring budget
- ofc some stuff you can "just" do, like cold calls, with time but no money
- I find that a lot of the classic advice (e.g. ShowHN, launch on producthunt) is not very effective if just done — sort of like coding your product in Scratch
- and then to make matters worse Seth Godin tells us ~ to market, build something worth talking about
- even just distributing enough to get usable feedback is not trivial — arguably a bigger, and earlier problem than getting enough distribution to be profitable
- possibly niches are "the answer" here, but just picking a niche is not the same as having a solid distribution strategy, either
- a lot of distribution stuff (on zero budget) is kind of one shot: you can only post on HN, producthunt or a given subreddit before you're getting banned or lose trust
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if you listen to ‣ Dan Koe, social media is the answer, but that's a whole other game you need to learn to play
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one strategy I should likely do more: treat marketing more like agile-built software — consciously iterate, have cycles or testing and evaluating
- also hard if the default response is just nothing, or, equally hard to interpret, seem to fluctuate with random factors such as time of day
- another possibly useful mental model is minimum valuable funnel, a sort of MVP for the distribution strategy, but again, this is not easily done
- Yet another idea: consciously setting a budget ($50, $500, $2000) that you are willing to spend. Mentally say bye-bye to the money, and don't plan to get a return on it. This changes the whole game probably; we now have a whole lot of other tactics and strats open to us
- Probably worth going more into Seth Godin's strategy of finding a really, really small number of people who actually care — not aiming for the HN launch with the max amount of eyeballs, but trying to speak to the 5-10 people it's actually for.