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?
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 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 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.
If you’re doing that honestly, where they really have that problem and you actually have a good solution, you’d be a jerk not to lightly pitch it at that point.
You could probably do that up to 100 or so customers reasonably easily.
Also known as: If you build it, they will come.
In the real world, it doesn't matter in the slightest if you build the best product in the history of the universe. If you don't have the proper marketing and sales pipelines, you will lose to the product that does.
There was a great article on here a while back about VHS and Betamax. While Betamax was better by nearly every metric, it lost.
Same for HD-DVD against BluRay. And for so many other great products that have died on the vine.
I think this is actually a bigger problem with society as a whole than people notice. The majority of people think that an idea alone is as valuable as a business. People regularly tell themselves that if they would have come up with X, Y, or Z, then they'd be rich and successful. When in reality, the product or idea doesn't equate to success in the slightest.
It's the same thing that I'm sure a lot of you in tech see, where people say "Can you make me an app?" or "We should start a tech company that does this one thing better than the other guy." And yet almost every single time I explain to them that there are 4,000,000 versions of their app already, and that it's still a business that requires significant effort, they act like it's my fault for not helping them or not believing in their idea.
I've let millions of better ideas fade from memory without a second thought. Because I've learned that operating a successful business is an entirely different world from building a cool thing. The idea is the easy part. Everything after it is the actual work.
There is some nuance here.
Manufacturers didn't know if people preferred shorter, higher quality (Beta) or longer, less quality (VHS). That's partly why there were two formats.
Most people like to say VHS "won" but what it really won was the consumer market. Beta won the professional TV news market because it turns out news stations had a high demand for short, high quality video storage.
I point this out only to say that winning isn't a one dimensional/binary outcome. You can "lose" in one market but still be very profitable in another market.
Not every measure. It could hold like half the recording as a VHS.
The “killer app” for video tapes was being able to record live TV when you weren’t home with timers on the players. VHS could record more without any intervention.
It also meant most movies could be watched all the way through without interruption.
People didn’t care about the ever so slightly better quality of Betamax. They cared about getting their moneys worth and not being interrupted.
That’s why VHS won.
I feel like Im in the process of swallowing that pill.
Marketing comes later.
I tend to interview 30-50 people initially to find a gap in the market. If I'm into something (strong PMF), a good percentage of those people I interviewed will be future buyers.
I typically have cascading meetings for the following steps:
1 - is this 10X better than what currently exists
2 - does our prototype look 10X better
3 - does our v1 solve the gap we found
4 - what features do we need to build in order to get you to pay for it
5 - what features do we need to get you to refer us to 3 friends
A meeting for each of those goals typically leads to customers (again, if I've found PMF).
If you can't find your target market, you might want to consider a different demographic that you understand better. Most successful startup founders started a business specifically to solve the problems they dealt with at their last job. They understand their product market fit because they ARE their target market.
First step is guessing who your customers might be.
But sure, I'm working on things for parents/students, home buyers, and DIY heat pump installers.
* Parents/students hang out at schools and are probably a good referral/recommendation crowd
* Home buyers are looking for mortgage comparisons on Google (but that's probably a terrible strategy, since this is a highly lucrative segment to market to, so you should expect high customer acquisition costs)
* DIY heat pump installers will probably look at ads on /r/DIYHeatPumps
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.
Marketing comes first. Sales second. Product third.
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
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.
I think I am definitely gonna try the direct sales approach, to try and fill out the platform once its ready.
If your product is a wellness product or app, that's like catnip for a TikTok influencer. If it's a B2B SaaS, probably the opposite.
I 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.
For instance when David Duffield got kicked out of Peoplesoft he went out and started Workday to make a competitive product and of course his name was well known in the industry so the skids were greased for him.
See also this legendary story: https://www.marketingmonk.so/p/salesforce-grit-to-giant-mark...
1. Make sure the market for your product exists before you make it. This is counterintuitive to builders like myself and probably you. building is what I'm good at, and I know what I'm making adds value, but that doesn't mean others will see that value.
2. Kinda goes with #1, but talk to as many people as possible in the market you are considering a product for and learn what their problems and pain points are so you can solve them. If you can relieve someone's pain, the marketing will do itself. It's hard to even get the conversations, but each one is helpful, even if it's telling you something you don't want to hear.
3. Focus on gaining external interest, not necessarily revenue. Again, hard, but a pilot or partnership with another startup or small business can go along way and showing value to future investors or customers.
4. Talk to and learn from other founders. Your already doing this, but there are nuggets of information that can help even if it's just a slight change of perspective.
5. Keep your head up. It's a slog and it's brutal, but it's a marathon.
I'm still working on all these things myself, so you're not alone. The realization that a good product without a market is nothing, was a big revelation for me (and in hindsight makes me feel like an idiot). I honestly thought if you solve a hard enough problem or built a good enough product that the rest would fall in line, but that was not the case, but I'm not ready to give up yet.
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?
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.
What I do is stop building and focus 100% on marketing - well, 90% because I can't help myself. Even if this isn't as "fun", you need to switch modes and stop building.
As for my approach, I start with Google Ads + SEO/AEO. Google ads can get results in a few weeks (Google does have a learning phase) and SEO and AEO is a much longer process, which can be months before you see results. I use AHREF to check my SEO/AEO progress. While AHREF isn't a direct measurement of Google, I've found their DR to be correlated with my organic traffic.
Good reminder that ads can show results fast while SEO compounds slowly, running both makes sense.
I'm pretty sure my primary job is marketing the work that I do.
Source: CS grad turned revenue person
I got one question that I can't find the answer to on the website.
What sql variants does it support? Postgres? MariaDB?
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.
ETA: based on your profile you started March 20 but in 2025 and your domain name expired. Did you build a product that has a fixed cost to remain live? I found your video, your YT seems popular. You can make a free website with GitHub pages and point your URL at that at least. Keep persisting, you can do it.
Thanks for the words of support. I will definitely try to be more active on youtube and leverage that.
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/)
I once knew a guy who was disabled and walked on crutches. Jobs got mad at him for being late to a meeting, and the guy replied "well someone parked in the handicapped parking spot, and it took me awhile to walk from a normal parking spot.
No joke, Jobs looks him (a disabled person) directly in the eye, and says "oh, that was me; I think the country built an excess of disabled parking spaces after WW2." To the disabled guy!!!
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.
later automate the daily upload? but human in the loop doing egamement is a must.
> 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?
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.
doesn't seem like you're risking much if your products are not getting any traction in the first place
Marketing for Founders
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47380295
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 am currently taking it.
From the landing page:
> Most of us, when we want to ship a product, we start at the beginning and with the most obvious ingredient: the product. Because when you can create, the act of creating feels most natural and straightforward. But it makes it so easy to end up with a product that nobody wants to buy. And isn't that every new entrepreneur's worst nightmare? All that work, and nobody cares.