Ask HN: How to find help marketing an MVP to programmers?

[sigre]

We're a small team of two programmers, and we've just launched our MVP (www.pushlayer.com, if you're interested). It's a service geared towards iOS developers, and we're looking for someone to help us out with the legwork of getting feedback to validate our concept.

We've been spreading the word ourselves, and tapping our own connections for feedback, but as our backlog grows, we'd love to get someone else involved to help us continue spreading the word.

Has anyone successfully found another person (even someone just helping out in their spare time) at this stage of their company? We're wary of any true "marketing" person, as we're really looking to reach out to fellow programmers.

Thanks for any and all advice!

[ig1]

I wouldn't at your stage, at such an early stage the founders need to be interacting with users, you'll lose too much (information) in communication overheads if you bring in someone to do it.

[orangethirty]

That's just bad business advice. You need to market right from the start. Having a dedicated person to do it is actually more productive than the founders themselves doing it.

[route3]

>> That's just bad business advice.

I'm no MBA or startup guru, but I don't often hear "Founders in very early stage/prototype stage should avoid interacting with their users". Early stage interaction is critical to the success of the product.

>> Having a dedicated person to do it is actually more productive than the founders themselves doing it

If the goal is to get to know their audience needs, and iterate the produce development quickly, then dev-to-dev feedback is absolutely critical. Now is probably not a good time to clog the feedback filter by adding another human to the mix.

You can spend 30 hours working on your product backlog of features that haven't been vetted, or you can spend 30 hours getting to know your audience and discover that NSCoreLibFoo gives people the most trouble with push notifications.

What would convert more: a homepage hero about the three new features you dreamed up OR the fact that PushLayer can fix everything that sucks about NSCoreLibFoo (which half of your audience hates with a passion as you discovered).

[orangethirty]

I did not say founders should not interact with users. What I said was that if possible, a marketing person should be assigned or brought it as soon as possible. Founders have to realize that they don't have to do everything. Letting others do for them is what helps a business grow.

[ig1]

If you haven't found product-market fit then what you need isn't marketing, it's product management and that's something that founders need to be heavily involved with at early stages.

[vetleen]

Don't you think you need users to move towards product-market fit?

[ig1]

If you don't have product-market fit it's normally much easier to move the product than it is to move the market.

[goodwink]

How do you know if you're in this situation or if you simply haven't been able to get the exposure you need?

[soneca]

Would be too shocking if I consider this a "How to find a non-technical co-founder" question?

Because I think that is just what you need. I don't think a freelance, temporary or part-time marketing person would be a good choice. A real co-founder, responsible for marketing your product would be ideal. Someone that could hack the distribution part of your product.

Actually, I don't have any practical tips of how to find this person, but my advice is that you should think of her as an essential part of the team, not a disposable labor with a specific mechanical job. Don't be the "code guy" versio of the HN stereotyped "idea guy".

Maybe something you could try is trying to find, on startups' events, that non-developer young guy, who is kind of lost there, not pitching any of his ideas, just trying to understand this environment and learn a few things. My guess is that this persona, with the right potential skills, could be a good distribution co-founder.

[sigre]

That's great advice, and perhaps that's really the answer. Based on what I've been directly observing, most of the "marketing" that I do is pretty mechanical: A/B testing, posting updates to our existing users and soliciting feedback, adwords experimenting, and writing blog posts and other content.

In terms of prioritization, spending my time improving the product and offloading this mechanical work just seems like the right thing to do.

[argonaut]

I disagree. That non-developer young guy has (as far as you are aware) the same, if not fewer, non-technical skills as the technical founders.

The only people worth bringing on board as non-technical founders are people you know personally, whose work you have seen yourself (and liked), and whose communication skills are a known quantity as well.

If you're going to bring on some random, you might as well do the distribution yourself.

[Kanbab]

I have a background in marketing/sales/adwords/social-media-hacking, and im finishing up a 3-month web-dev course. I guess you can say I will be able to speak the language of your target clients (i'll have to read through some objective-c tuts to really know what they struggle with).

What kind of work are you looking to get done specifically? Two things that I would do is: spend about 5 hours a week on Quora tapping iOS developers, spend about 5-10 hours a week on StackOverflow tapping iOS developers. All non-spammy.

Other things to do are: guest-blogging, requesting reviews.

Work requirements would include advanced analytics of incoming links to see how all of the off-site activity is performing.

[sharemywin]

I'm not sure I would get it out to more users, yet. If your still working out a large backlog of issues you may want to focus on the product. If you have a small but dedicated group of users, you might want to focus on making the product better until that users are refering others to the point its starting to grow on its own. Then, you know your product is ready for hockeystick growth.

[sigre]

Cool, and that's been our overarching strategy.

What I'm concerned about is that, as we work through the backlog of features, we also want to grow the users simultaneously. This will help us avoid a "bias of small numbers", in that our small group of initial users keep us focused most specifically on their needs, potentially taking us away from building features others might find compelling.

Hockeystick growth is for later, when we've achieved product-market fit. For now, I just want slow, linear growth to make sure we're consistently filling our backlog with compelling features that users actually want.

[vetleen]

Have you given any thought as to how you might grow later on, when you want to scale? I ask because this is a good opportunity for you to also test (“validate” as you put it) that part of your business concept.

[sigre]

Definitely. From a technical standpoint, it's Rails app on Heroku (using unicorn), using Sidekiq. I've got a ton of background with Rails and scaling on this platform, though not a lot with Sidekiq. I'm very excited about the possibilities with this though, and I've used redis quite a bit. On our backlog is to do some serious load testing. I'm also quite aware of the recent RapGenius/random routing stuff.

I'm planning to do a series of blog posts about how we built the site and some cool lessons we learned.

From a marketing perspective, the plan is to make an absolutely killer product that developers will enjoy using, and will tell anyone within earshot of it. We also have a couple of cool features that haven't been tried before with push notifications that I think will be intriguing enough to land us some general tech press. I don't have terribly specific scaling plans around marketing yet, as I don't want to put the cart before the horse (i.e. I want to prove there's a product-market fit first, then spend more effort on getting the word out.

[argonaut]

I would avoid prematurely optimizing. Scale when you need to scale. Right now it's pretty clear that scaling is the least of your problems.

[orangethirty]

In plain words, what does the product do for me?

[sigre]

It's an API you use to send push notifications to iOS devices that have your app installed.

More specifically: it (a) makes debugging missing notifications easier, as it often feels like a notification just disappears into the ether, (b) it's priced based on actual usage, and (c) it saves you a ton of time from having to deal with Apple's APNS, which in my experience can get quite hairy.

Based on our split testing and other feedback, one of the next items on our list is to rewrite the about page. Thanks for the feedback!

[xauronx]

You know, your pricing page says the same thing you just did "It's priced based on actual usage". That's not true. It's a flat fee of $25 per month. Priced on usage would be $0.01 per push message or something, so the price scales based on actual usage.

That being said, I want to use this.

[xauronx]

Actually... It does say lower in the page that pricing is $0.02 per notification, but you're to prepay for them. That's kind of conflicting with the "$25 per month" that I saw above that. I assume if I prepay $25 and don't use all of them then it carries to the next month?

[sigre]

This is great feedback. The $25/m gets you 2500 notifications prepaid, but it's a use-it-or-lose-it kind of thing.

I'll definitely clarify that. Thanks!

[sigre]

Cool! We're going to be putting in coupon codes in a day or two. I'd be happy to give you an extended discount if you'd like to give us feedback on the service. Shoot us an email (info -at- pushlayer.com) and I'll hook you up.

[markddotme]

Just sent you an email. Would be great to talk.