YHK - yet another hacker news clone

35 points lazarkap 3 hours ago 19 comments

I've shipped multiple products over the past few years. Every single one followed the same pattern: build, post, get 12 likes from friends, a bit of organic traction, then nothing. Back to coding a new thing.

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?

PaulHoule 2 hours ago | parent

Marketing can be a lot of different things.

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.

Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago | parent

If I may ask, was the product B2B or B2C and do you feel any particular advice which can be different for the two (B2B/B2C), I would love to hear your opinions on it.

PaulHoule 12 minutes ago | parent

B2B with a high level of customization. Sales would have been very high touch and not all on the run ads, sleep, repeat model you see in B2C.

brudgers 2 hours ago | parent

You take off your solo technical founder pants and put on your solo marketing founder hat.

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.

didgetmaster 2 hours ago | parent

Jobs and Wozniak proved (at least in the 70s) that a great technical founder could team up with a brilliant marketer and build a huge company from next to nothing.

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.

iterateoften 2 hours ago | parent

Jobs was a marketer, a product visionary and a ruthless businessman. You need more than just marketing.

hungryhobbit 1 hour ago | parent

Asshole. The word you're looking for is asshole.

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!!!

codingdave 2 hours ago | parent

You seem to have missed the key step. Talk to customers before you build. Build what they need. Then have them talk to you to adjust things until you really nailed down the product that solves their needs, and then have them talk to their friends about how much you rock.

Marketing comes later.

collin128 1 hour ago | parent

Strong agree here. I'm a non-technical founder.

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).

ericd 53 minutes ago | parent

How do you usually find the people you interview?

garrickvanburen 5 minutes ago | parent

I flip this around.

Marketing comes first. Sales second. Product third.

pizzly 4 minutes ago | parent

Perhaps in the past. I think the approach now will be to vibe code multiple projects very quickly and see which one has traction even with a low quality product. You will get much better feedback than a discussion with a potential customer who may not even know what they want or have a false idea of what they want. You can always improve a product that has demand and abandon the ones that no one even downloads. Usage and payment are the real test if a product is worth doubling down on.

FpUser 1 hour ago | parent

On one particular project I started by "spamming" relevant interest based forums. Luckily I was a member of said forums for quite a while before I have released my first version. It was about 13 years ago. Strategy had worked and then I got CEO as a partner along with some investment so I no longer had to do it

reassess_blind 1 hour ago | parent

I've always relied on Google Ads and eventually SEO for my SaaS products. For SEO, I've had good success with having the landing page be an unauthenticated version of the app itself (modified to include SEO friendly text), allowing the users to immediately start using a limited version of the app which eventually prompts for signup. After signup, any data from the landing page shell gets pushed into their account.

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.

keithnz 42 minutes ago | parent

depending on product, I've been using Claude code to do market analysis. I'm quite surprised at how good it has been. I'm not sure how well it works in general, but for Agriculture (which we target) there is a LOT of information out there so analyzing market segments is pretty good.

jason_zig 18 minutes ago | parent

I solo founded a business and it just crossed 100K MRR (still solo). The trick is:

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

ofabioroma 7 minutes ago | parent

Every change you do to make the product better 10x the effectiveness of your mkt

garrickvanburen 6 minutes ago | parent

“The business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.” - Peter Drucker

I'm pretty sure my primary job is marketing the work that I do.

bko 2 minutes ago | parent

What's the product?

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