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Comment by kintamanimatt | Hacker News Reader

The marketing and sales copy is horrendous.

> Jolla is powered by Sailfish OS, a truly open and distinct mobile operating system. Navigate effortlessly with the gesture-based user interface and load the phone with top Android™ apps.

That's pretty much it. Bland, uncompelling, and unemotional. It's a poorly positioned phone that isn't cool -- but it could be with decent marketing and a great sales pitch. Way back when, if Apple had marketed the iPhone with this pitch, there'd be no iPhone today.

There's a lesson here: prospects don't know or care about you unless you make them. I have no idea who these people are, why I should care about them, or why this product will make me feel good or alleviate some pain in some way.

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It's how Finns speak English. I work in Nokia and this is exactly the sort of stuff I hear from them. It's something they could use some help with, but hey that's why we native English speakers are around...

Technically on an English proficiency test I imagine Finns would beat lots of Americans ;)

Marketing can be very expensive, but it's useful as well. Jolla probably prioritized development and production vs investing millions in marketing. They have limited resources and had to make choices and the first priority was a functional product. It affected many areas besides marketing (for example lacking community infrastructure, no public bug tracker and so on). Hopefully they'll gradually catch up in these aspects, but so far they seem to have enough of demand for their level of production. Don't compare them to Apple - they aren't huge company which pours millions into marketing from the start and expects some crazy numbers in sales in return right away. They aren't Nokia either - they are a small startup.

That's the build-it-and-they-will-come mentality! (It almost never works too!)

Great marketing is as important (possibly moreso) than a great product. It's probably easier to make a mediocre product a success with great marketing than to make a great product a success with ho-hum marketing. There's no point in having a great product that nobody knows about or worse, cares about.

Product development is like eating out: if you can't afford the marketing, you can't afford the product development. Paying for one and not the other is a great way to throw away the investment. It's just such a rookie mistake and completely unavoidable.

No, it's make things gradually and don't overstretch mentality. They know their resources and limits and apply them appropriately.

> There's no point in having a great product that nobody knows about or worse, cares about.

You didn't read carefully what I wrote above. They already have a lot of people who know and care about the product to buy it. They aren't running to increase that number up to the extreme. They match that number with their current production level. When that will grow, they'll have to boost the effort in marketing too. They do plan to grow, but gradually.

Personally I think they cut the marketing / community side a bit too much, but I understand that they have limited resources, so the product is their priority #1.

It's not overstretching to have great marketing from the outset; it's almost mandatory. Tofu marketing from the get-go (especially on launch day) is a great way to nudge the company into the deadpool. If their financial limits proscribe marketing, their company will be gone and forgotten soon enough when their sales are lackluster and insufficient.

Companies, new and established, just can't afford to be conservative when it comes convincing people to give them money. Bad marketing = bad sales.

> It's not overstretching to have great marketing from the outset

Your general logic seems to circle around expecting massive sales and huge production mindset (where investment has to be compensated with millions of sales). Jolla has modest expectations for the starting stage, so massive marketing would be an overstretch. But it shouldn't be abysmal either, I agree.

No, it doesn't. My mindset in this case revolves around one thing: convincing people they should buy. Their sales and marketing, from what I've observed today, is so poor it fails to do the only thing it should: sell.

I never said they should grow unsustainably and run out of cash, but my money is on them running out of cash anyway because their marketing is so poor it'll fail to drive the sales they need to keep the lights on. Frankly, supply shortages would be the best thing that could happen to them because scarcity drives demand and perceived value.

> Their sales and marketing, from what I've observed today, is so poor it fails to do the only thing it should: sell.

How is it exactly, if they were serving all their preorders already? They don't seem to have the lack of demand atm.

Exactly, keeping the early adopters happy and getting them to advertise their product for them is much more important. And regarding that: even the otherwise sceptical review by The Verge praised their interaction with the people who bought a Jolla.

What are "top" Android apps?? What does it mean?

It sounds like only top-selling Android apps are available, because they need to be ported somehow to the Sailfish OS and that the porting takes resources that are only applied to those "top" apps...

... which is not very reassuring: if the porting effort dries up then the phone won't be able to run any app...

... which is scary for something that costs almost as much as a top-brand phone (at under EUR 100 I'd be willing to take a chance, but not at EUR 400).

I believe they say "top" because they have only two alternative app stores installed on the phone. They could not install Google play.

You should be able to install more app stores, since app stores are themselves Android apps. So you could add Amazon's app store, for example.

Google Play is also installable, but "unofficially".

There are un-marketable features to consider, which make it quite compelling and emotional.

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