I was contacted this week by an old acquaintance, and he had a proposition for me.
"Hey, I hear you're a programmer! That's great, because my buddy and I have
this idea for a business. We have everything important figured out, and all we need is a programmer to throw
Do you mean “for free” or do you mean that tech people ask with the assumption that it’s easy?
Mostly I mean the assumption that’s easy and that you can just “do sales and marketing” after the fact. Sales people are too “sales” to work for free. :-)
I’m actually curious about this. After a product has been made by a company and marketing comes in, what would be their optimal role? They have to make the product market ready and make it presentable for a target market, don’t they? That means finding which target market the product fits, how big the market is, what the market is interested in or needs, what the product needs (or doesn’t) in order to be able to sold in that market, what it should look like (?), how the company itself should position itself with their branding, what the brand is and looks like (colors, font, placement, etc.), …
That’s what I’ve gathered from being in companies that had no marketing, hired marketing people, and the marketing people having long discussions and looking utterly exasperated due to being brought in so late (years after a product was made).
So, I’m curious, what would the optimal project look like for marketers (marketeers?)?
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So I’m neither a marketing or sales guy, though I have done a bit of both.
What I’d say is that if you are trying to create a successful business / product … you need to be considering marketing/sales before you actually build anything. The classic tech founder mistake is to build something nobody wants. Or that costs more to produce/support than you can sell it for.
I’ve got a funny story about a dotcom era business I worked for, where an amazing tech team built this product that was miles better than anything our competitors were doing. We spent 18 months getting it all built out etc. And then the business guy came in and ran the numbers and pointed out to us that our return on investment was longer than the replacement cycle of our hardware. Oops …