| Patrick is falling into what, I call, the marketing trap. I like some of Patrick's advice, but I wouldn't follow this... ever. Patrick has a nice little niche business but that's all it is, a niche. Niches, by definition are really small, focused and low in demand. In a niche, the stream of new customers eventually dries up and the temptation is to move further and further over to the marketing dark side to keep the ship afloat. Deceptive marketing tactics work, but they shouldn't be necessary. If that's where this is headed, then just go full darkside into scamming and call it a day. Grey and black hat techniques are a bad as crappy products, terrible service, bad systems and stolen ideas. If you wouldn't think of using any of those, then don't use scammy marketing. If you find yourself pursuing deceptive tricks, it's a sign your niche is not big enough and your product is not high enough in demand. This is the most common trap analytic/scientific minded business owners fall into. Many people on HN have voiced concerns that the current crop of startups are increasingly using deceptive practices to boost their businesses. A well planned business should not have to do this. It's one thing to decide to be purposefully evil, but rationalizing it as necessary is amoral and possibly illegal. |
He definitely has a niche business. Many of us do. For most of us, our niche is tech. Patrick's niche is education.
In the tech/startup niche, often the extent of marketing that is required is posting to HN and getting featured by TechCrunch. Trying to expand our niche outside of this is probably a bad sign, and most likely ineffective. I hold this thread as a prime example of how much we hate advertising.
The education niche is quite different. You don't reach them by getting coverage for raising a round of financing or writing a blog post on SEO that casually mentions your cloud based retro encabulator. This "deceptive" marketing may be an effective way to raise interest in different segments of his target market.
Traditional online advertising is increasingly ineffective because of all the bad ads in that form. Would we be so quick to ignore all ad-like content if we hadn't been tempered with the aversion therapy of flash horrors, scams, and weightloss/white teeth/work at home? The end result is even advertising that might serve a useful purpose can't exist in that environment, so, like bacteria after the invention of penicillin, it has to adapt and change and find a new way to continue. If only "good" ads make the jump, then I think we're better off as a whole. If bad ads make the jump, we'll soon get pretty good at filtering them out as well. Honestly, if scam ads can blend seamlessly into a page, what does that say about the actual content?