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?

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

Message me I'll do 2h of being your marketing cofounder for free.

Source: CS grad turned revenue person

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

As a builder/developer, marketing often isn't considered "fun". But you need to do it, else the build was for your personal entertainment/learning exp (which is sometimes a good thing).

What I do is stop building and focus 100% on marketing - well, 90% because I can't help myself. Even if this isn't as "fun", you need to switch modes and stop building.

As for my approach, I start with Google Ads + SEO/AEO. Google ads can get results in a few weeks (Google does have a learning phase) and SEO and AEO is a much longer process, which can be months before you see results. I use AHREF to check my SEO/AEO progress. While AHREF isn't a direct measurement of Google, I've found their DR to be correlated with my organic traffic.

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.

I guess the question is who is your customer or more specifically who's your buyer, who's your user and where do they hang out ? Also how do people find out about you product ? Distribution takes time, so I think its important to gauge interest upfront rather than commit to building first.

In general, the answer usually is to find people in your own network. If you go by that funnel the first thing you need is a network. LI is great at this. The next thing is to see who in your network is worth talking to. Find out whether the pain-point that you recognized resonates with them. A LI blast to your network might work as well to give you a bit of credibility. One thing that is cited often that does NOT work is spamming people asking for their time to learn about a problem. Nobody ever got back to me wit this method. But asking people in your own network for warm intros almost always works.

When bootstrapping something, marketing is about finding distribution channels that work for you. Looks like you never found such distribution channels, learn and keep grinding on that, organic and tik tok dancing is not the only game in town. I do everything from tech to sales, marketing and support for my company based of my oss work: Filestash (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash). For my business, the most important channel is SEO and particularly creating online tools to get people to interact with the product so if you search for "online ftp client", "online s3 browser" you will inevitably found my product. That's the top of the funnel, the cold traffic and the goal is then to transform that onto paid customers. For me, I make calls with users, try to understand their problem and fix it for them. In practice it's a lot tougher than it looks because with AI less and less people are / will pay for software

“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.

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.

>I know I need marketing help but giving equity to someone I met online feels like a huge risk.

doesn't seem like you're risking much if your products are not getting any traction in the first place

Think of marketing as "letting people who might use/buy your product that it exists."

You can't buy it if you have no idea it exists, right?

So how do you get the word out to the potential duatomers? You can read traction (the book), or just ask gemini/perplexity where you should advertise to find them.

Recently:

Marketing for Founders

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47380295

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.

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.

I am curious what products you shipped? Could you share link of 1 or 2 here?

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.

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.

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

honestly the thing that worked best for me was just writing about the problem i was solving, not the product. like a dev.to post about why server side processing is unnecessary for most dev utility tools got way more traction than any "hey check out my thing" post ever did. people engage with the take, then they find the tool naturally. also reddit > twitter for early stage imo, the subreddits are way more targeted

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

> Every single one followed the same pattern: build, post, get 12 likes from friends, a bit of organic traction, then nothing.

> I know I need marketing help but giving equity to someone I met online feels like a huge risk.

No offense, but your equity, from your own admission, is literally worthless. If someone decides to help you out for your equity, you should be jumping for joy. Most likely you need to pay out of your pocket, but if you're not willing to risk your own capital, then how can you expect others to risk theirs?