Ha, what a fool 2008 me was. What I didn't realise was that my two main tasks for years would be marketing and customer support.

Coding new features (of which many were requested) and fixing bugs (of which there were many) had to be scheduled around the twice-daily customer support windows and the marketing efforts.

Nine years later, and still the stream of customer support requests has not relented! Nine years and still I'm focusing on marketing one day a week!

And of course, there are still bugs.

I wish I could upvote this more than once. Customer support burden is always underestimated. It's time consuming, especially if you want to do it properly & not just outsource to someone overseas following a script. Even releasing something as freeware is likely to cause an unintended stream of support enquiries. I have no idea how the folks selling 99c apps manage it, even one short email enquiry would wipe out a dozen sales or more (if you put a monetary value your time).

Kudos on charging a sensible price for your app & upgrades! I imagine at that price point it's okay if a sale incurs a support ticket or two.

Before I charged money for my software, I was afraid of the overwhelming flood of customer support requests. Except they never came.

> even one short email enquiry would wipe out a dozen sales or more (if you put a monetary value your time)

Per email, yes, absolutely. Sometimes I take 20 minutes to answer a more complex email. But since I know that I don't receive more than 5-10 emails, I take the time and this person might recommend my software to other people, because of the great support.

An easy way to mitigate customer support is to have FAQs and lots of written texts on the website. Most people prefer to help themselves I think, because its faster.

Sometimes I wonder if this is a mentality thing. My customers are all Germans. Maybe US customers are faster to send a short email than browsing through FAQ.

> Maybe US customers are faster to send a short email than browsing through FAQ.

I get some emails where the entirety of the support question is "The program doesn't work. Is it a bug? Please advise." Some customers don't mention which product they're using, or will even send me support enquiries for competitors products.

Not meaning to be ungrateful (I'm lucky to do what I do!), just that I couldn't afford to do it on a $5 one-off app purchase.

1. You could repurpose emails and turn them into FAQ content (= small SEO improvements).

2. If I take the time to answer an email for 20 minutes, I just find it intriguing and such an email almost always helps me to improve my expertise a bit.

3. Even if it's a whole month of support per year: So what? This is my job and I get paid good money for it ;)

> "The program doesn't work. Is it a bug? Please advise." Some customers don't mention which product they're using, or will even send me support enquiries for competitors products.

Get aText or TextExpander or something like that, make a predefined template that asks for more information.

While I answer every single email, I try to spend the least amount of time on people who seem a bit...weird in their questions. If people don't take the time to write a good question, I don't take time to provide a good answer. Requesting more information is a good way to annoy them a bit back. Maybe they either clarify what they want or they'll try to help themselves.

> just that I couldn't afford to do it on a $5 one-off app purchase.

Have you thought about turning this into a subscription? If it provides value on a daily basis, people might pay more than you think, let's say $12 per year.

I do that, but it also creates support enquiries for competitors products. I rank well for "how to install Photoshop Plugins", which means I get the emails for how to install my competitors plugins too :) Should be great lead-gen, but I've not found a way to convert those visits into downloads/sales of my own plugins.

> Have you thought about turning this into a subscription?

Sometimes, but some customers specifically said they bought my software because it wasn't a subscription. I'm also charging $20 - $25 per sale now, trying to price for at least one support case per sale.

Ah I see. You've got some general advice content and people write to you about it. Since you obviously tracked conversion for that, I see these options:

a) Answer those emails sincerely as a hobby

b) Answer with a template only ("Please write to the creator of that plugin you found, they'd love to help you!")

c) Explain somewhere in the article that you can only provide email support for paying customers, then don't answer

d) Put in the article: "If you need help installing a plugin other than $MY_PLUGIN_NAME, I'm happy to provide support for you for $15 per 15 minutes. Buy customer support now"

If you're used to carving out a slice of your day to respond quickly to a batch of such emails, then it's fine. But if you're in a frame of mind where you're primarily worried about something else you really feel you need to get done, it can seem very hard to set that aside and reply to even a single email in any meaningful way.

(But yes, I've also had the experience that charging money does not suddenly make your users any more demanding.)

7.5(the average of your 5-10 emails per day)*30(days) /7000=~0.003 =%0.3

how would you explain the fact that only 0.3% of your customers send you an email/month ? What contributes to it being so low ?

they don't. or they quit. or they raise their price...

You gave me an idea for a business model - Let's say you offer a pingdom-like service (to monitor your site availability and reliablity) -

You can just do the following:

1. Offer the service 100% Free, at your own risk

2. Offer a $x/month subscription . if you don't pay - you won't get any customer support.

Or, you can will still offer free support for non-paying customers, but without any priority (their tickets will be handled only after the paying customer's tickets)

Does anyone know of a company that is offering this type of model ?

(edit: added missing words and spacing)

As a SaaS founder — I've always felt it's a bit of an odd value proposition — "pay me more, and I'll fix my flawed, buggy software".

There's a small incentive to write deliberately obscured code, but I think it gets outweighed by maintainability concerns.

Hmm. I think it makes sense if you begin with the assumption that all software is flawed and buggy by default.

Also, you'd be incentivizing your company to make support more complex so users call, email etc.

Apple in-app subs let you "cancel" but only in the way of not paying for the next renewal, so it is a widely used model already.

exactly this. Just cancel his subscription the NEXT month, and you solved the problem, financially and technically :)

And who would HATE this proposition ? the spammers :) now they won't be able to do what the OP has suggested they might do (pay -> get support -> cancel ):)

(edit: spacing.

I spend a decent chunk of my time on support requests and have thought about this quite a bit. While the number of incoming support requests are evenly split across (1) people interested in purchasing, (2) people who have already purchased, and (3) people who are on our free tier, the latter group ends up having the longest support conversations.

I've thought about setting up an autoresponse that asks people to add their subscription ID to the email for priority service.

I don't know if this would work, backfire, or do nothing, and I'd be interested to know what others have experimented with.

It's an old-school desktop app with a 30-day trial period, a single payment to unlock the app, and a major new version released every two years available for an upgrade fee to existing users.

I know I used to feel this way before I really tried to launch a product. Now I know that there is no such thing as a product that is so good that it sells itself. In fact the best technical solutions I've seen have failed because the market doesn't care about perfection, it cares about mind share.

There is still a stallmanesque anarchist quality to some engineers that view commercial success as tainted. I think I can appreciate that in some philosophical senses, but let's not get too high on our horses.

That aside, 99.??% of startups will need to market heavily to compete successfully.

Edit: And I just noticed the (Software) parentheses in the title. I guess you can replace self-driving cars with advanced AI, say the first AI to pass the Turing Test.

For instance, I worked with an early stage hardware startup whose customers were developers (you couldn't actually do anything with the device if you weren't a developer. It was a SDK not a finished product).

They generated tons of press because hardware is much easier to understand, show and write stories about than software. But despite being in really high profile publications (millions and millions of people seeing it) - it failed to move the needle sales wise.

- Most developers aren't reading these publications

- Most press articles don't mention the developer angle

- You're just one of many many stories that day in a big publication.

- In some ways is _really hurt_ because it made it seem like it was a $100 thing you could buy at Target than a complicated SDK. This resulted in lots of non-devs buying, being wildly disappointed and wanting to return it.

http://www.forbes.com/2003/11/19/1119aviation.html

But when they get to your website, they have to know why your car is better than the Toyota being released a month later, and that they won't miss their current manually operated car. Chances are, your LIDAR guy isn't up to the task.

I was co-founder at a project that has received 10+ newspaper articles (progressively better placed) and growth kept declining over the months only to become negative.

However, I obviously understand that one can never look at these factors in isolation and that there are multiple variables on which growth depends. I would also not consider press to be a part of marketing really.

This is definitely a product that needs media management, because the key question is not so much if it works but if it's safe. That has to be a key part of any self-driving-car strategy. And you also need a legal/lobbying team, as the comma.ai guy found out.

That is why while I appreciate what FOSS has become, as someone with coding experience since the mid-80's in home computers, I don't have any qualms with commercial software, specially since I also have the experience of what it meant failing to do pure FOSS business.

6) What if someone steals my idea and beats me to the market?

Due to the culture of secrecy propagated by big companies like Apple we too believe our ideas are unique and need to be secret.

If anything, the best ideas are usually incremental changes to already existing ideas but I digress. The point is being first to the market means squat but if you have a solid marketing plan and a consistent supply of leads (+ good relationship with your list) then you will make money. period.

7) A big launch is the end goal

Even a big launch is only 1% of your total traffic put leniently. So many people put all their hopes on a big launch.. So you're on Techcrunch, big deal. I've had many sites on TC, Mashable, etc but the traffic usually means nothing. You get a burst of signups (probably 1k+ in a week IIRC) but that is like a drop in the ocean and just like posting on a Forum, the moment your post drops from homepage - it's history. On the other hand, good SEO, and consistent supply of leads (say 100 leads a day = your big launch on TC in 10 days) is what will keep you in the game and make you money everyday.

8) If I have more traffic my site will grow

Getting traffic is half the job. Converting that traffic into paying leads is where the money is. If you think your lead will buy from you the moment it lands on your site, you're being naive. You have to romance your subscribers, give them free bonuses, educate them and then one day when you have something they need, they will buy from you - even if you're last to the market or are charging them more. When people trust you, you will get more repeat business than the new orders. I bet people with iPhones are the biggest consumers of the next iPhones too. Never ever underestimate the power of up-selling (though this one I think you only learn from experience).

For early-stage founders, this is a misleading suggestion. Yes, it's true that if you could have great marketing without any cost, you'd want to have it.

But this misses the point that if you put $5k into marketing every month, then you're putting $5k less into the product.

So the real question is, would you rather have a good product and great marketing, or a great product and good marketing? I will concede that some founders don't put enough emphasis on marketing, but quotes like this overlook the basic cost-benefit balancing act that early-stage founders live and die by.

Also, I cringe every time I see a "Tweet this" link. Especially in a piece about marketing, it reminds me that this guy wants to build up his personal brand, which is why he's blogging in the first place. I understand that, but this in-your-face reminder (3x in one blog post) makes the piece come across as less of a "I learned some lessons I want to share" post and more of a "I'm trying to build a brand so I blog a bunch, and this is what I came up with for a post."

It kills the authenticity and makes the whole thing suspect (and then when I read trite stuff like the above quote, that confirms that the information contained within isn't thoughtful—it's largely filler).

You should do as much sales & marketing as you need to generate a reaction from your target users. Then pay careful attention to that reaction and adapt the product. The focus is always about learning rather than evangelizing - putting a half-baked product out there and then blasting the hell out of Facebook/Twitter/Medium/PR doesn't usually get you very many recurring projects, but putting a half-baked product out there, attempting to sell it to a few engaged potential customers, and then adapting it in response to their feedback might.

I don't imply that marketing is pointless at early stage but time-consuming marketing channels (blogging, social media) are best avoided at that time. A detrimental mistake that I made when I was making a product was to think that I need 'marketing' to get more (beta) users. I started writing blog articles without understanding that I needed at least a baseline of users who really desire the product. Reading about some of the SaaS successes, I think that a lot of entrepreneurs get their initial users from people they know / ads / reachout. Strong marketing effort kicks in when the product seems useful for a market and organic growth doesn't feel enough.

I've been building a search engine for talks (https://www.findlectures.com), and when I demo it people often give me new language that helps the copy on the site, or ideas for features that communicate the value better.

There are places that marketing can be done before product/market fit. If you are well funded and 100% committed to building for a certain audience, there is value in creating content and building a following. But this doesn't necessarily require marketing headcount.

I think, hiring a marketer is a big problem. Let's say you are a group of engineers building a good product and you know you need to hire marketers. The questions are, how do you hire a marketer? What criteria do you seek in a marketer? How do people become marketers? One obvious choice is trying to find someone who marketed a similar product before but it is not always easy. I think this is also the case for hiring sales people.

This is so true!

Yet, it took me a lot of time to understand this. Maybe because this is not always easy to see that the shift perceived, between what I said about my product and how my interlocutor reworded it, is in fact a move from details to the product's essence.

The article implies that all marketing will be effective, or at least that you can easily have a positive ROI just by hiring a marketer.

This is not necessarily true, especially with the limited capital that many bootstrapped startup may have available.

Experincing negative ROI (or even hearing experiences about that) seem more likely candidates for why it isn't done than the "Myths" listed here.

The WHAT is driving me nuts. I get the WHY and HOWs of numerous marketing channels and methods.

Pretty much what happens when I start blogging. I put a lot of effort but even the blog post itself must now be marketed.

Put it in on HN, Reddit and it feels like playing lottery...

I have a few SaaS products out in the wild and find myself longing for the days where I just had to worry about maintaining a decent WP site (with various integrations around it).

All the work that goes into just maintaining a SaaS application tires you out - particularly if you're a solo founder - leaving less time available for marketing...

Is there any recommendations for all in one turnkey service for marketing? So that i just pay money and they do the rest.

Marketing is first and foremost about understanding what your client need and want. This allows you to let your devs know what users are begging for, thus making your product more compelling, and to make your copy using words straight from the horse's mouth - for SEO friendliness, explanations of what your product does in terms of client needs and wants, etc.

If you outsource the thing wholesale, either you de facto outsource your product R&D, or you end up losing touch with what your clients actually want and moving forward in an ivory tower.

I advise a few startups that are paying local marketing agencies thousands of dollars a month (much to my chagrin) to "take care of marketing" for them. None of them have seen any real traction as a result.

Granted, it's anecdotal, but I just can't see how a marketing agency can be effective unless given substantial guidance from the founder(s).

You still need to provide them with the talking points and value proposition so they have the background for drafting copy for the Marketing collateral, but once they have that they can do a great job at putting together a marketing plan and executing on it, assuming you found a good agency.

There's the rub. How do you find a good one? We've spent obscene amounts of money on agencies that said they could get us growth but none made the needle move. Where are all these good agencies?

Although it's not "turnkey" as the OP was asking about, you can do a lot of it on your own, or at least put together an overall plan, and then use agencies to fill the gaps. Just as with starting a start-up, there is a lot of great material and thought leadership out there on how to do it, along with a lot of practical advice.

Other than a few courses as part of my business degree, and working with marketing agencies in the past, I don't have a marketing background. However, I took a deep dive into marketing over the past 18 months, and we achieved some solid results. I spent a bit of time doing some research, came up with a strategy and overall plan, and then executed. Specifically, we put a content marketing program in place, along with some lead tracking tools, spoke at a few conferences, did some webinars, etc., all of which led to deals in the six figures. (In the B2B space.)

PM me if you'd like more detail re: resources.

I mean, in both cases it's possible to hire competent people or firms to help you, but you still have to like actually be involved in the core work of getting customers.

So indeed, by the time I was ready to let beta testers in, I had no real network on which to rely on to get it in front of peoples eyes. As a not-for-profit, I don't plan to make money off it (and hence don't plan to spend much on it), and am not interested in the VC side of things.

I remember initially reading BetaList's requirement of submitting to them before you actually launch and I found it ridiculous. Now I realise, if done right, it's the proper way to go about things. And I missed that boat badly.

This is how social networks work, invite your friends systems, etc.

However, even then marketing is still important. But too often marketing is seen as: Spend huge amount of money on ads.

No: marketing is market research, choosing your target audience, branding, image building, tone-of-voice etc.

This is marketing.

Coding is the easy part!

"Founders predictably underestimate the importance of hiring marketers."

They do? Who are these founders? Founders of what? And who are these people predicting the estimations of these founders? How did you learn of these predictions? Are the predictors publishing their founder predictions somewhere?

"As a result, many startups don’t get round to marketing their product until it’s too late."

I realize I'm being pedantic now, but "get round" threw me for a moment. It's another break in the flow of reading his message. I wondered what's "get round" mean? Is that like getting fat? Like getting "round about the middle"? Oh. he means "get around to". Googling "get round" returns 400k results. Googling "get around": 55M. I guess some people do say "get round." 1 out of 137 people. Word choice matters.

"This happened to me and I’ve thought long and hard about why this happens."

What's he referring to? What is "this" that happened? I had to stop and reread the previous sentence to figure out what "this" and "happened" refers to: "startups don’t get round to marketing their product until it’s too late." So a start up didn't get round to marketing a product. Okay, so I guess that implies that a startup was lazy and irresponsible by not getting around to marketing a product. In short, the problem is that something bad was done to a product. That's what happened to you? Inflicted upon you? David Bailey is a product and a startup didn't market him responsibly.

I stopped reading at this point. He put so little care into editing and proofreading his article, I figured he probably put just as little effort into crafting a meaningful message and formulating logical conclusions.

I guess I'll never find out what the pretty girl is praying for.

Once you have that, marketing is easy and cost effective. Until then, it's usually a waste of money.

I had a niche product that went "viral" within its small community. We immediately had people trying to imitate us, and most failed so badly that their products didn't work at all and any gains they made were quickly rolled back; ultimately, these copycats only served to promote our actually working product further, so they were net good things.

A few key people who controlled large platforms in this niche spurned us, presumably because they intended to copy our featureset at some point, and actively removed any reference to our product. Despite this, we had continual growth with relatively small marketing budgets.

After about a year, a competitor whose product occasionally worked emerged and despite being much worse than us along every conceivable axis, they cannibalized our niche market within 2 months using spammy marketing tactics (astroturfing, fake followers/likes, SEO link rings (now called "Private Blog Networks" in SEO parlance)). They also forged alliances with some of the niche platforms that refused to allow discussion of our product (though these companies ignored similar offers when I tried to make them). The new competitor eventually spammed so thoroughly that they caused a PR issue for a large company whose data this sector depended on. My company and all others that occasionally functioned in this sector, which at this point included me, the spam company, and 3-4 atrocious copies of the spam company, were all shut down by legal threats from this large company.

The point of this protracted story is that it seems that any business that could go from 0 to millions would be immediately bombarded by imitators, spammers, and copycats, whose superior marketing game would destroy the original company as long as they can imitate 10% of the necessary core functionality. Did you have defenses against this? If so, what were they?

Surely the "inherently viral" aspect of a product is a marketing strategy? (albeit one that is open to optimism)

This seems to be a larger part of the problem; one developer's marketing strategy is another's "just build it this way".