As an engineer, I was trained to look for and implement efficient and elegant solutions to problems. At the same time, I was lucky enough to start my career with mobile development, which requires me to practice product and UX thinking as if I am the first user of what I build. But marketing is what I've never been trained for, or rather, never have I thought it was a big deal. In the mindset of an engineer or a designer, building a great product is all it takes to attract users. I held a firm belief in that until I learned how HF does marketing with even just a peek of it.

At HF, we have irregular sales and marketing give and take meetings on Thursdays. (Thursday is always a big and exciting day when we demo one week's accomplishment and hold Q&A with our CEO, and also bi-weekly team-outing events.) DK, as our marketing guy, would explain the progress of his work. I find myself amazed by almost every sentence he said.

The art of marketing - vision

September 12, 2013
Marketing, as DK says, is different from sales in that it convinces people in a great vision instead of meeting a right-now need. A salesman selling water would tell you that you will no longer be thirsty once you buy it. A marketing person would make you believe that same bottle of water is what keeps you fit and a continuous supply of it will make you even better.

Blue ocean strategy

September 27, 2013
A lot of companies and products are in the same macro space as we are. It is a red ocean indeed, and people are overwhelmed by all the marketing noises from them. We need to think deep in how our product captures a micro space that no one has noticed, and thus it creates a blue ocean for us. While all the other major companies advocate their most cutting-edge technology, their low price, their features, we win people's heart instead of their mind. To think as one of the potential users, what they care really isn't what technology we are using or what fancy features we can provide. If we ever started to talk about those, we were just one of those companies who try to sell to people what they have instead of to meet their needs in heart.

So we tell people that: People are the most valuable asset to a team. And our product helps you bring your team together. Here's how it achieve this ...

That's right. We don't talk about technology (although we do put great focus on it in terms of development), not features, not price (although our price is much cheaper than some big players). We start with sharing a value with our customers that most of the time they will agree. By that time, we have successfully brought the game from that red ocean to our blue ocean, because they start to think in our direction. Compared with the buzz of X feature or Y technology, the value of people is so huge that they won't even put them on the same level or evaluate them with the same standards. We win their heart instead of trying to arguing for our technology, features and prices over others', because our vision is totally on a different level from them.

Think hard and endlessly how you market the product, until something stands out from all others, only then do you find the niche.

PR firm and reporters

October 24, 2013
Around 4 AM this morning we got a wave of press coverage. (No, it's not launch day yet, we are still in stealth mode.) We got advice from one our board members that to make it easier to hire great people, we need certain exposure. So we did.

A couple of weeks ago, we signed a contract with a startup PR firm HA. HA is a small team but is very good resourceful of press, and is very eager to help companies like us. We are a good match.

What happened was HA scheduled a bunch of reporters for us in SF. To provide good content to them, we figured that we need a good story about how the two co-founders started HF, and from that, what our vision is. HA did a great job helping our CEO sks refine that story with their knowledge of what reporters love to hear and write.

The interesting thing is that although HA started with rehearsing Q&A with sks, he decided (after endless but improving Q&A practices) that screw it he would just keep talking for the entire hour and leave no time for questions so that there'd be no chance for leaking what exactly we are doing. So there it goes - one hour of speech without touching the real core of our product. Nice job sks :P

But we did make sure what we wanted the reporters to write about. The mentality of reporters, as DK said, is that they have a story in mind before the meet, and they just want to get something from your mouth so that they can add the quotes to their articles. That's why sks constantly mentioned our competitors, as a result of which almost all the articles mentioned us as WX killer or something like that.

As for the results, it's pretty impressive. We got 3000+ visits on our website, 500+ early signups, and 50+ job applications. And those all came when others still knowing nothing about what we do. Ha!

Content strategy

October 24, 2013
From now on until we officially launch in March/April next year, our marketing is in a content generating mode. We hire part-time writers from Stanford to write articles based on our vision. So when the launch day arrives, people will have been educated and expecting a solution to our vision.