I just assume all resources that claim to teach the basics of marketing will be bad. Like they themselves are all marketing, no value. But maybe you know of a book or series of articles that is useful? I’d love to learn how best find people who could use our products.
@bjhess I wrote this a while back… your post / question reminded me of it.
I would agree that most ‘courses’ you might go through in marketing will not be enough / rubbish … because there are a lot of charlatans in the game. The problem is that it’s a big question … there is no magic sauce … which is why companies spend a lot of money trying to get the answers to those kinds of questions.
Would be great if it was easier.
It isn’t.
But the question is really valid… and just as we no longer need hoards of developers to build product … look at the amazing work Manton is doing right here, we don’t need hoards of marketers to answer your question. We just need to find the Manton of (the specific bit of) Marketing for you - which likely needs a more specific spec of your question.
@JohnPhilpin Thanks, that is a good reminder. It's often easy to convince ourselves that getting a product in front of the right people is a series of "tricks" that we could learn if only we had the right instruction. OTOH, when you're a small team you often try to learn something good enough to get the ball rolling. (Even sometimes legal or tax things!)
We would like to have someone help us with marketing, for sure. I don't know if we're quite ready for them as we're still yet to build our next product, which will be something we expect to generate revenue. Though if we met the perfect person now, well, that would be hard to resist!
Basically we're a team building niche products with svelte UIs, most likely directed at consumers. We're goofy, our software is intending to be human, and that means our homepages will be human rather than tuned. We realize this may lead to friction in getting the word out, but we hope it resonates with other humans. We know they're out there!
One thing we're pretty confident in is the mantra: Do Things, Tell People. So we will be firing up our writing outlets. Newsletter, blog, changelog, and perhaps a Things I/We Learned page. There are countless examples out there of this being an important base to build from. (Certainly there are examples of people writing every day and gaining no traction. Unfortunately it's hard to "discover" those times it failed.)
(I mean, this could be a blog post right here, I suppose. :)
@bjhess Definitely recognize the challenge of the startup … done/do enough of them. The thing to remember … which you clearly grok … is that the best product in the world will generate no income if nobody knows about it.
.. and certainly in a startup the boxes on the ‘ORG chart’ have to be very fungible.
In an earlier life I recall meeting Ellison shortly after Oracle had shipped me over from the UK to ‘global marketing’ in sunny California. He asked me ‘what I was doing’ … adding that ‘if you’re not building product or selling it … tell me real slow.’
No pressure!