This can't be said enough, especially on this board.

Being successful is not about cool languages, or neat P2P source control, or cool machine learning, or any of that.

That's just the stuff we like talking about. Why? Because most of us have no idea how to actually make something cool that makes us money, and it's easier to talk nerdy stuff than business stuff. It's the "geek dance"

Being successful is about doing something that people want and then telling a lot of people.

I've heard (here) that the develop-to-promote ratio should be about 1:10. In other words, for every hour you spend developing, you should spend about ten promoting. I believe it.

We don't like to hear that, and it's not fun and cool to chat about. Somehow it's not even mentioned that much anymore around here. The ratio of develop to promote articles is the inverse of the work involved! In fact, people who self-promote (like me, or jgrahamc) are sometimes looked down on.

Sounds like a cool book, and thanks for the reminder. I look forward to ordering it with my next Amazon purchase!

"This can't be said enough, especially on this board."

This seems to be one of the major blind spots of HN readers. Making something people want should be trivial compared to selling it. Think about it. You get to choose any business you want, so why would you choose one where making something people want is difficult? If you realize this, you wouldn't. Which means that if you choose a smart business then you're right that 90% or more of your effort will go toward promoting, marketing, and selling. It's true that making something really difficult to copy is a barrier to entry, but it doesn't make sense to make something difficult to copy just for that benefit, because in most cases the barrier of selling is an order of magnitude bigger anyway.

I don't follow. If you spend 10% of your time making something you then have to spend 90% of your time promoting... are you sure people really wanted that thing?

Better to spend half your time doing customer development concurrent with product development, and go through lots of iterations with real, actual breathing customers, to arrive at something people want. Then it will sell itself.

Marketing after-the-fact can't fix a turd.

The idea that good products sell themselves and "marketing after-the-fact can't fix a turd" is largely a myth. Look at Hendrick's gin. It tastes like Pinesol, but because they came out with this clever marketing campaign saying "only 1 in 1000 gin drinkers prefers the taste of Hendrick's" it's now one of the hottest selling new liquors on the market. And I have friends who've never even been to a gin tasting who swear backwards and forwards that it's better than Hayman's or Bulldog or whatever. Hendrick's sells itself on quality only in the sense that the marketing is the product.

Now if you're making something like a car then clearly taking a strategy like Hendrick's is going to catch up with you, like it did for GM. But the fact is that you can make just as money selling gin as you can selling cars, so why go through the pain of designing the car?

My suggestion is to do your marketing up front, concurrent with development, to get incremental buy-in and iterate concepts until you find a good one, instead of on the back-end. I find you have much better results that way. You can arrive at something that 'sells its self' by aggressive customer contact and pre-selling. But in fact, it didn't 'sell itself,' you just did your marketing up front to make sure you built something people wanted to pay you for.

As to marketing being able to sell bad products, I reply: New Coke. ;)

"people who self-promote (like me, or jgrahamc) are sometimes looked down on"

This was the hardest lesson to learn when I started trying to promote my new site. I realized that I knew nothing about the magic of promoting! I'm still learning actually but separating the bull from real solutions in the website promotion world is very difficult. I took being called a spammer very personally and am trying to avoid that behavior at almost all costs. I'd love to see a HN for site promotion but I'm afraid it would be a top ten list for directory submissions and keyword stuffing.

That's a very good eye opening article, seriously. Most developers think that if the code is good and well designed, people will use it, but marketing is so important, that sometimes a worse product is picked up instead of the better, just because of the exposure..

Sometimes if an application is well designed and built that can be enough. It depends on other things though, such as if the marketplace is crowded or not.

Google is an example of something that won out because it was the better application, search wasn't a largely cluttered field though and they were taking a largely new angle on in. If your putting out another social networking app at the moment though it's unlikely to catch on just because it is the better designed app, just look at the troubles something as large and as well backed as friend feed is having.

google had a strong product and even stronger word of mouth marketing that got it rolling - of course, word of mouth would not be there without a good product. Same snowball effect could have been seen with gmail.

Do you have any examples of software products or services that won by sheer force of marketing? I can't think of any.

Also, "good" and "well designed" are totally subjective- everyone thinks their own baby is beautiful and brilliant. The problem may be that your product isn't as amazing as you think it is, not that someone outmarketed you. Good marketing/PR can give you a quick jump out of the gate, but the best product eventually wins the race. (Isn't that the lesson of the "shark fin" alexa graph?)

This is a clever way to promote his book.

I hope that the content of the blog post is actually useful though. The key to promoting anything is to make the promotion itself useful. If you want to get a journalist to write about your X then you need to make sure that your X somehow fits into what they want to write about.

Same goes for this blog post. Yes, it talks about my book, but it should be educational. A lot of people pooh-pooh PR and marketing but they are vital to success.

Maybe it was just me, but the 5th time I read "my book" was the time I had to stop reading entirely. It was incredibly annoying. You, of course, have every right (and need) to promote your book and doing so with the intention of also being educational is commendable, but I just couldn't take reading that phrase every other sentence.

For me personally, the content of the blog was a bit common sense, however the "clever way" of promoting the book was educational.

I've learned two important things about marketing in the last year 1) Virality doesn't come from what you build, you have to get it into the hands/minds of people who will make it viral or viral isn't code/product/design it is people powered. The deadliest bug in the world could have all the potential to wreak havoc, but if it doesn't get spread by the right people at the beginning, it isn't going to go anywhere

2) you have to keep marketing. You can launch a product and it can do fairly well, but marketing is an ongoing task.

I disagree with 1). I mean, I agree with the idea that reaching the right people matters, but I don't think it's all that matters. You might want to check out my recent article: http://danieltenner.com/posts/0009-how-to-make-your-applicat...

I like this post only because I can relate. When I launched my most recent project I had a pretty poor response rate even though I emailed a lot of folks individually. Fortunately I made a list of who I contacted and now I'm going to email them again and let them know about some changes I've made to clear up initial points of confusion. Inspired +1.

Google just gave me 30 pounds ($45) of free advertising! Can't complain...