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Comment by fbliss | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for weighing in, Ben.

I built it for the ideal user, I have a second one that is a luke-warm lead in the pipeline but currently getting screwed by a vendor who shall remain nameless. The problem is, these sub-par vendors have been around and have strong marketing, I have no marketing, and we both know marketing is what gets people's attention first.

I actually have one system integrator for the product this connects to interested, and I'd love to get more of them on board with it and selling it to their customers as well.

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Waiting for this silver bullet you call "marketing" to which attribute all success will kill your idea before it can become a business. It's a defeatist attitude.

Proactively looking for and contacting possible customers and building a feedback cycle and improving your product and how you pitch it will give you a chance to turn it into a business or company or whatever your ambitions are.

Agreed, my attitude did smack of defeat.

My plan however is to get on some focused groups, for example, LinkedIn SAP groups and try to find some system integrators to talk to there.

I'm not sure that 'marketing' means what you think it means.

Your problem description is vague but it sounds like you're saying in this comment that you are looking at evidence that in this market you either need to get a strong salesperson or be a strong salesperson, but currently aren't making either of those happen.

I'm not quite sure why you're skeptical on my understanding of marketing. Before I worked for myself, I worked for marketing firms, I'm not concerned that there is some base confusion there, I'm just saying

a) I don't have a working budget for design work, branding, or sales staff

b) Some folks around here have been there before too, and found a way over the bootstrapping hump, I'm curious how.

My question is poorly-worded. It was written at a moment when I was frustrated, but I was hoping for a good story from someone about how they got past the stage where you don't have the capital to commit to scaling the business up but you have good tools ready.

If the market is such as it is, then I'd say that the bootstrapping way is to become the sales staff yourself (as everything, it can be learned/improved), the growth way is to get outside funding for sales staff, and there likely isn't a third way.

And the marketing question was because it looked like that you say that the marketing part actually is okay, the product and message fits the market, but your direct sales activities (i.e., the actual closing the deals/"make them sign on the dotted line finally" activity which is probably the only part of customer relations that's not usually called marketing) are lagging.

I see, thanks for clarifying. My direct sales activities haven't ramped up yet for this product. I've been working with my client who has told me endless stories of the vendors who charge ridiculous money for really poor results. I'm frustrated in general with companies who do great not because of quality products, but because of sales & marketing.

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