[lesterbuck]

There are a bunch of resources on marketing a product. Rob Walling's book Start Small, Stay Small, is mostly about marketing and picking a market. The Micropreneur Academy (micropreneur.com) is a collection of material that greatly expands on the book, plus a private forum. They host Microconf yearly (already sold out this year). Dane Maxwell teaches similar skills in TheFoundation.io. Mixergy interviews are filled with case studies, and Mixergy Premium has dozens of courses on marketing and selling for tech startups.

[jwwest]

Rob's book and the Micropreneur Academy is exactly what I was thinking of when I mentioned "hand waving" I've read the book twice, and subscribed for several months.

I found that their advice consisted of two things:

1) Find a niche using Google Adwords.

2) Rank #1 with SEO.

And that's about it. It's incredibly vague and frustrating, especially when most niches are oversaturated these days. I reached out to Rob about this, and he replied "yeah, it's hard to find an untapped niche". The entire premise of building a product in his materials is based around finding a nice that's underserved and that you can rank easily in Google for. Anytime someone tells me to solve marketing issues with "just use SEO", they're immediately discredited in my mind.

That being said, the rest of the book was solid. The problem I have is that there is very little actionable information on selling a product outside of Magic SEO-land, which everyone knows is a myth.

[lesterbuck]

Maybe we read a different book. On page 148 of Start Small, Stay Small, traffic is broken into two quality tiers. The top shelf traffic is (1) a mailing list, (2) a blog, podcast, or video blog, and (3) organic search. Second tier includes a longer list including PPC, social media, etc. So the book itself doesn't even list SEO as the first item in the top tier.

And Rob's book is a small part of the universe of startup marketing. Mixergy has plenty of stories of businesses starting without SEO as their primary driver. One amazing case study is Sam Ovens, who was so successful at marketing first before building anything that he not only extracted money from the people he had interviewed, he took the same virtual product (not yet built) and extracted cash from new customers who hadn't been helping him design it. Then he built it. And his niche is hardly unique; there are obviously many more areas like that to mine. How did he choose a niche? He didn't do keyword research. He studied the employment ads and looked into business categories that were hiring a lot, to see if he could help them automate with software:

http://thefoundation.io/sam-ovens-case/

Has anyone offered to pay for your niche product before you build it? That would be a nice filter to see if you are building something people want.

The cruel reality is that building the product should occupy about 15% of your effort. The sales and marketing, including idea extraction, market research, etc., will be 85% of the work. There is an ocean of marketing tactics and information out there, and it is a lot more detailed than your two step summary above. Sometimes marketing gurus want to reach a broad audience, and they package up a ton of their best information into a regular book. Perry Marshall did it with his Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords (much, much more than an Adwords book). And you can buy the Kindle version for the low, low price of only $3.99, which is an incredible price/performance.