This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

Case Study: Stack Overflow is better
If you’re a programmer, you’ve visited Stack Overflow. It’s a profitable
company with more than 250 employees, dealing with millions of visits a
week. If you have a question, it’s probably already been answered on one of
their forums.
Stack Overflow saves programmers time and effort, and it’s also a
passion project for thousands of the volunteers who contribute content.
How did its founder Joel Spolsky make better happen?
In the early years of the 2000s, there was a programming forum called
Experts Exchange. Their model was simple and obvious: They hosted
answers to common programming questions, and you had to pay to read
them. A subscription cost three hundred dollars per year.
In order to build the business, they came at it from a place of scarcity.
The questions were free to read, but the answers cost money.
To get traffic, they tricked the primitive Google robots that search the
web by showing them the answers (which got them good search engine
traffic), but when people showed up they scrambled the information, hiding
the answers until people subscribed.
Experts Exchange created profit via frustration.
Joel worked with his cofounder, programmer Jeff Atwood, to come up
with a different approach: make the questions visible, make the answers
visible, and pay for the whole thing with job advertising. After all, what
better place to find great programmers than a website where great
programmers come to ask questions and give answers?
Along the way, Joel discovered that creating a better product meant
treating different people differently, telling stories to each constituency that
matched its worldview and needs.
For programmers in a hurry, he made it easy to find a question and the
best answer for it. The answers are ranked by quality, so programmers don’t
waste time.
He realized that for every person who answered a question, a thousand
people wanted an answer. Instead of trying to frustrate questioners, he got
out of their way and gave them what they needed.
But answerers were different. For them, he built a community, a ranking
system, a series of levels that would enable them to build a reputation and

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be rewarded with power over the community.
And job board posters were different as well. They wanted a fast,
efficient, self-service method to find the best people. No hard sell, no
distractions.
Joel didn’t want to put his personal stamp on a personal site. He set out
to be of service, to make things more efficient, to tell people a story that
they wanted and needed to hear.
He built something better, and he let the core audience not only spread
the word but do the thing that an outsider might have thought of as work.