As a marketer, I have a confession to make...
If you have to market your product, you’ve screwed up.
Marketing is all lies. It’s what con artists use to convince people to buy products that are scams and shams.
Great products sell themselves.
No successful business ever has to market its products or services. They don’t need to. Like truffle sniffing pigs, potential customers will just smell that there is a fantastic product in the market and will find it on their own.
So build. And make sure you keep quiet about your product. After all, to tell anyone about it would be marketing. And that’s sleazy and unethical.
Obviously, I’m being sarcastic but if the first three paragraphs made you feel warm, fuzzy, and validated inside then I’m afraid that maybe entrepreneurship isn’t for you.
Entrepreneurship is about building a successful business - and that involves both creating products and selling those products to potential customers.
If you want to do one and not the other, then find a job that pays you well to do that. There's no shame in it and you'll be saving yourself a LOT of stress.
Long story short - if you want to build a successful business, then you need to be marketing and selling.
And all that involves is communicating with potential customers so they are aware of you and what you offer.
It’s not that complicated, or scary.
Especially today.
Pre-internet you needed to either have a lot of money to pay for advertising or, if you didn’t, the confidence and skillset to cold call.
Today, you can reach potential customers for free without having to pick up the phone and cold call them.
So, by all means, build a great product (though it’s not absolutely necessary), but make sure that you are also investing as much if not more time in marketing that great product to potential customers.
Of course, there are some methods of communicating with potential customers that are more effective than others but that’s a topic for another discussion.
In the meantime, get out there and market!
I get what you're saying.
But there's no stronger marketing message than after you've actually added some concrete new value to your product (i.e. new features, new UI/UX, new process flow).
If marketing works so well to increase revenue all the time, entrepreneurs would be marketing 24/7 -- but business is complex, and this isn't how it works.
What happens is you market your product, you get some new users, great, but immediately you also get feedback (or sales objections) from some users on why they aren't ready to buy.
It's missing this/that feature, your UI/UX as-is sucks balls, your app is too slow, the onboarding process is confusing, "why should we use you when XYZ is better," etc., and all these feedback cannot be brushed aside.
Sometimes marketing is the bottleneck of your business, sometimes the product is the bottleneck, and wisdom is having the acumen to know which is which.
Good marketing is often wasted on poor products.
Pardon me for the analogy:
But imagine a fat guy who's constantly going out there approaching women and trying to get their number.
He approaches 100 girls, all 100 reject him. He approaches yet another 100, and all 100 reject him again!
Should he still approach the next 100 girls?
Or should he take 6 months off approaching, go to the gym, lean out, get some abs and improve his dress sense, work on his social skills, ensure that every aspect of his life is dialed in, and then try approaching again?
If you market when your product isn't good enough, or as good as it can be, you're wasting good leads who would otherwise convert and become loyal customers.
They try it once, it's not good enough, it leaves a sour taste in their mouth, and they leave forever (worse, they might even badmouth your product publicly).
Is that what we want? Nope.
So marketing and product development has to go hand-in-hand, and you must know which one takes priority at this exact present moment, and it can be marketing, but it's not necessarily it.
Hey Jay,
Thanks for the comment.
I see where you are coming from but I (respectfully) disagree & I'll explain why.
You can have a great product and fail to grow and be on the brink of bankruptcy (Apple in 1997).
And you can have a terrible product and still grow to $29 million ARR and build a happy and passionate customer base (HubSpot between 2008 and 2011).
The difference between Apple and HubSpot in those moments?
The marketing and growth strategy they used.
When Apple changed its marketing (and used what would end up being the strategy that HubSpot would use from 2008 onwards), its growth exploded.
Of course, it's good to have a great product. HubSpot eventually had to improve its product to continue growing, but it still outgrew most businesses AND built a very happy and passionate customer base with a product its founder admitted "sucked".
But just like you don't need six-pack abs to find a romantic partner, your product doesn't need to be that great in order to build a successful business.
Take your business for example.
As someone who has both been the seller and buyer of marketing tech tools, I can tell you that your features are not that important to the buyer.
If I'm buying your product it is because I want to build a profitable Twitter following.
How you help me do that is irrelevant. If you can provide proof that wearing a red hat all day will help me do that, then I'll buy a red hat from you.
More seriously, if Zlappo was a productized service, it wouldn't matter. I'm not buying the fact that I can reorder my tweets or set up custom time intervals. I'm buying a more profitable twitter audience. How that happens is irrelevant.
Yes UX is nice. Yes, having a good onboarding process is great. But all I care about as a buyer is that my twitter audience is makes me more money. If it works then that is the only really important thing. The rest is nice to have.
It worries me when I see lots of people with great potential wasting their time polishing a product that doesn't need polishing. Indiehackers rarely fail because of bad product, they almost always fails because they couldn't market.
In other words, they retreat into the product gym and spend forever trying to get 6 pack abs when the truth is they never needed them in the first place to reach their goal of building a successful business.
Apple has been far more successful than HubSpot over the long run... mostly from building interesting and cutting edge things.
Nowadays they mostly exist on the coattails of their former success.
Hey ,
Thanks for the comment :-)
I'd put that largely down to simply being in a bigger market (consumer market is huge compared to the SMB and B2B space).
And of course sexy products don't hurt!
Very well put!
Thanks Robi :-)