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0 pointsmarcus_holmes4y ago0 comments

I hate being treated as "just the nerd who pushes the nerd-buttons to make the thing we want work", as if the important part of the work was having the idea and not the execution.

One reason they do this is usually around control. A lot of people feel like they have to be in control of everything in order to be safe. There may be ways you can make them feel safe without needing them to be in control.

Another reason is that until the thing is built, there's nothing to do, so everyone gets involved in that. This happens a lot in startups where they have a "build it and they will come" attitude. It's not true; building a sales/marketing channel doesn't actually need a product at the start, and there's a ton of stuff that needs doing while the product is being built. But it can be difficult explaining this to new founders.

Good luck :)

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3 comments · 1 top-level

MonaroVXR4y ago· 2 in thread

> "building a sales/marketing channel doesn't actually need a product at the start..."

Never knew this, can you tell more about it?

marcus_holmesOP4y ago

The technique of building the funnel to point to a "sign up for our mailing list and we'll let you know when the product is ready!" link. You get valuable customer insight from the funnel, and if your marketing funnel is working right then you'll get interested customers in your mailing list. If it's not then you can iterate on it, and find something that works (or fail fast if you can't find anything that works).

mikeshi424y ago

I'm curious if you still see this working well these days, or what techniques you use to make it work well. I've historically found those types of pages quite useless when we're in a time that anyone can throw up a page to try to validate vaporware and no one wants to give out emails.

I have a feeling that advice was great 10 years ago, and not so great now.

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