Build it and they won’t come

Starting a software product? A software company? An Open Source software product? A consulting company?

And do you refuse to do that nasty thing called marketing?

Bad news. You’ll fail. Anyone who ever created anything they wanted to sell had to learn about marketing really fast.

The first time you make a product, it comes as a shock when you discover that no-one knows and no-one cares. News of a great product does not spread by magic.

Your new wonderful product is one of thousands, or maybe millions, of wonderful products being released right now. Almost every one of those products is owned by someone now discovering that a great product does not, in fact, sell itself.

It is a shock for many of us when we first experience this.

That shock partly comes from realising that we are not immune to marketing. Many of us software types believe we are hyper-rational, and we decide for ourselves— on a completely rational basis — what we’ll buy and consume. Once we discover that no-one knows or cares about our new product, we also start to discover that for each product we’ve bought and used, we’ve done so because of a concerted marketing effort to get us to do so. We are not so rational.

More bad news. Marketing is hard and you have to keep doing it. You can’t get away with a single advert, or a single marketing campaign. You need to start marketing and keep marketing.

There is good news, though. Start learning a bit about marketing today, roll up your sleeves and get into it, and keep doing it day after day, week after week, and you will be already ahead of creators of those thousands or millions of products being released right now, and whose creators will inevitably give up.