Don’t throw away your competitive advantage

http://nathanbarry.com/competitive-advantage/

by revorad • 14 years ago

29 11 14 years ago

nathanbarry.com

nathanbarry2• 14 years ago

A lot of people enjoyed reading the conversation with Amy:

http://unicornfree.com/2013/difficulties-for-nathan-barrys-a...

It's interesting, since we didn't plan on the transcript being public we talked in a much more transparent way.

As always, happy to answer questions.

noelwelsh2• 14 years ago

These posts are a free masterclass on building an online marketing campaign. I'm not really talking about the content of the posts, though that is relevant. Rather, because Nathan is so open about what's he's doing, you can really understand the reasoning behind each post and he often talks about results in following posts. It's like you can see the construction plans if you look closely enough.

I'm not really his target market but I follow along just to learn how to be a better marketer.

nathanbarry2• 14 years ago

That's the idea. :)

I'm trying to share everything I am learning so that other people don't have to repeat all of my mistakes (just some). Hopefully by the end of this challenge we will have covered everything from finding a developer, to launching a product, to designing a great user experience.

jf223• 14 years ago

Except he's not a master...

noelwelsh2• 14 years ago

Although your account is 3 hours old and you've only commented twice, both on this post, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you want to constructively engage.

This is a drive-by comment. It's useless. Why not add something useful. Why do you hold this belief? What could Nathan do better? That would be interesting to know.

Nathan may not be a master at marketing right now, but the way he's going he'll get there. What he's doing is practically a textbook example of deliberate practice, and the best thing for the observer is you get to see all the mistakes along the way, instead of the cleaned up textbook version. I fail to see how this is not useful.

Thoughts?

enemtin• 14 years ago

Great read. I often think people sell themselves too short, so it's always good to reinforce not settling and know what your product/software is worth.

jwwest• 14 years ago

This is why there's so many products for designers and developers, honestly it feels like we're a bunch of naval gazing, self-important idiots who never learn to market correctly because we're too afraid to.

My biggest concern with the approach of picking something you have an existing audience with or is in some corner of your wheelhouse is that it leaves a lot of opportunity outside.

Is there not a huge competitive advantage in selling to underserved markets? You may believe market saturation is "bullshit", but it's much harder to get noticed in an already crowded field.

There seems to be two fields of thought on researching and marketing a bootstrapped product:

1) SEO and niche marketing. This is the sort of thing that Rob Walling talks about. Basically the idea is you research through Google keywords that you can rank highly for and build a product around that, regardless of what you yourself are good at. The problem with this is that the internet is full of scumbags and many online audience "niches" are already taken. PPC is extremely competitive as well.

2) Content marketing and "become famous". This is the approach that I think Amy and Ryan Carson recommend. This has a longer path to success, years in some cases, and is highly subject to survivorship bias. To be frank, it's hard to get noticed in our little world unless you're a) an extreme extrovert and b) extremely charismatic and/or c) really lucky.

There's a middle ground that Patrick McKenzie occupies that combines traits of #1 and #2, but also introduces the free radical of underserved markets. Actually, the reason for his success is that he initially started with an underserved market, and then used that to gain SEO knowledge and internet fame to leverage #2 to some extent.

I've emailed with Amy on this regard, her tone has been basically "Well, it works because he's Patrick". I disagree with this sentiment because it sets up a "Golden Calf" mentality that we mere mortals can't follow the same path.

jf223• 14 years ago

Seriously.

Its like a startup circle jerk around here with everybody trying to sell their lean social media analytics project management ab test tracker to each other.

erichocean• 14 years ago

I don't mean to self-promote, but I spent an hour over the weekend making my latest side project. If you have time, check it out at:

http://le.an-social-media-analytics-project-management-ab-te...

Feedback welcome! I spent the most time on the domain name.

Svtble writeup coming soon...there really is an art to coming up with ideas like this, which I learned by choosing the best toenail clippers last summer over a two week long deliberative process. I know most people wouldn't spend that long on toenail clippers, but I had to have the best. It's who I am. Deal with it.

Anyone want me to open source the code? All I did was add my copyright to the Bootstrap CSS, but maybe someone wants that? Just let me know.

Also, I've made $0 in the 10 minutes I've had it online, without any marketing or awareness other than this post on HN. What am I doing wrong? Is it too early to monetize? Would Stripe integration help?

UPDATE: Sorry, my WP installation couldn't handle the load! I'll see if I can get a cache up somewhere. Ironic that my first post was on "How I used a free EC2 microserver to achieve 100% uptime with a million simultaneous connections -- and you can too." I guess I should have tested it first.

UPDATE 2: Help!1! I'm being downvoted, but those cowards won't say why! What could I do better with my comment?

revorad• 14 years ago

This has a longer path to success, years in some cases

Do you know of shorter paths to success, that take less than years?

An underserved market is an opportunity, not a competitive advantage by itself. Your competitive advantage would be the ability and permission to talk directly to that market in a way that they would listen.

That's the point of Nathan's post.

Don’t throw away your competitive advantage

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