As an Indie Founder, why don't you hire a marketer?

@basv great question and discussion. For me personally, the main reason is I want to learn these marketing skills myself, this way even if the current product fails, I will have enough audience and skills (hopefully) to launch the next one successfully. And a combination of wanting to maintain full control over the product direction and probably limited resources at the early stages of Nuelink. P.S. I work with a team who help me with the marketing, SEO, Support etc... And planning to put more marketing resources as we grow.

I have a marketing team but not a marketing founder. I do my marketing myself. If I can learn to code and do hard things like that... I can learn marketing too.

I'm not an Indie founder. Still, here are a few thoughts on why it happens: 1) Not feasible for many Indie founders. It's just hard to hire a good marketer. 2) Hard to find a good marketer who would band up with an Indie. 3) Early adopters are mostly friendly. So it's better if tech founders can handle marketers themselves.

There should be a good marketer among the founders. There are no successful products without great marketing. At the initial stage, it is difficult to hire a cool marketer (who will go to work in a startup for a penny?), and you don't need a bad marketer, so either by yourself or not at all.

Great post! Me, I just don’t know why I should pick one marketer over the other. I’ve had a lot of different marketers reach out at this point and I still have the following questions: Would they offer consulting, am I getting copy, cost etc. There’s a lot to cover. And from what I’ve seen and received I’m not sure.

The same applies to design. I've worked with Indie Founders who lack brand presence, cohesive personality, and alignment with their product (all design-wise). They only hire a designer as an afterthought, treating the MVP as purely functional. Curious to hear about others' experiences.

@basv This is a good question, Sveta! I didn't hire a marketer at the beginning because 1. I launched my product last year and it was very rough and not functional, I did not need a marketer to market the product yet. 2. At the early stage, most startups' products still have many rooms for improvement, therefore, they may need business developer more than a marketer. 3. Although I am not tech background, I've spent so much time doing business development/marketing myself just to get to know what my REAL customer profile look like. Testing a way out by myself so when the marketer joins our team, I can share with them what my target audience looks like.

Hiring a marketer may not be a priority for an indie founder due to limited resources and a focus on product development. Additionally, they may lack the expertise to effectively evaluate and manage marketing efforts, leading to potential inefficiencies and misalignment with the product vision.

Because i am a marketer 😅

At least for me, I like the idea of bootstrapping my product and not spending until I'm making revenue. Though I might revise this in the future

Mostly because they are expensive.

I worked on the legal side of startups for around 2 years. From what I saw, marketing/content resources either came in too late or were too expensive. Unless you have a specific person on your founding team, marketing is pushed to the side to focus on commercial operations (not the best idea, but for obvious reasons, shaping the product/service comes first before pushing it out to market). You can choose freelancers, but they're not hugely reliable. It really comes down to budget and where the status of the product is. Because of what I saw, I created my content agency aimed at startups and growing businesses that offers an affordable, white-glove productised service that scales alongside growing companies and straddles between an in-house and external resource.

Hey Sveta, what I personally found is, if you have budget in the early stage a lot of founder do hire marketers but sometimes as they are too early they do not get the desired results and end up burning up their funds. For those who are bit more mature in stage, when they do hire a marketer it actually works fine, provided you can get a good one.

Said honestly: I don't do it just because I can't afford it. I have to carry on consulting to support myself, the bare minimum to live on, so that I have more time (but less money) for my projects! A partner instead of a collaborator would definitely be better! :)

Hi Sveta! Let me tell you about our experience. We work with my husband. He is a developer, I do promotion. Marketing is everything. This is from interface design to make it convenient for customers to communicate with a client on an urgent issue even at night. Hiring a marketer is usually hiring a person who will write a content plan for social networks and some promotions. This is too little to hire a person. I believe that the best marketer is a founder who develops in marketing. There are a huge number of books, the experience of other companies when you start everything yourself, because you know the product and the client better. And then you can already hire SMM, etc. I can recommend some books if you want

There’s no good reason not to. The story of fantastic products that didn’t get the promotion they deserved and consequently failed, and the converse: middling products promoted relentlessly and gaining solid market share as a result is as old as the world. To quote Zohan: I’ve seen this, I’ve done this. Trust me – you don’t want this.