karl taylor
Jul 25, 2017 · 1 min read

As a guy who has helped plenty of teams find success, I’ve started noticing that I hear this a lot. It seems like a wealth of great talent is losing out to better packaged-but-technically-inferior competition.

There seems to be a real disconnect where traditionally technically minded folks express the “build a cool thing and people will find it” sort of perspective, but I’ve never really been able to unearth where that bad advice comes from.

I find it particularly curious as one of the redeeming qualities of modern media properties is that they tend to operate in line with increasingly standardized practice that is more technical than it isn’t. (e.g., Facebook’s GraphAcademy)

From a rough glance, not all of these have obvious markets but quite a few do.

Boulder Tubing.
LocalFavorite (that’d have been delightful, really.)
Caffeine* (provided it tracked Apple/Google Health)
Where Are The Cameras

A few were likely poorly differentiated in increasingly cluttered spaces, e.g.,:
GrayNote
Derailleur
Grabber

There’s a lot of great tactical content online for aspiring marketers, but there really isn’t very much strategic guidance that helps folks start to think about things in the right way.

I’m a little curious: when you say that “building the correct product” and “learning to sell it,” aren’t clear, what do you mean, specifically?

    karl taylor

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    I'm a person who does things, on occasion.

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