Marketing - which is making the market aware you exist - is a fundamental element of business. Even those that do “no marketing” have to do some sort of marketing, it just isn’t the advertising sort.

There is all manner of marketing possible at all price points. Just hitting up your network is marketing. I have successfully sold products by having people answer questions all day every day to the long tail of Reddit comments in honest ways explaining how our product solves their problem.

True true. I'm a bit jaded after being gaslit into spending thousands of dollars on ad networks, one of which convinced me to hand over a few dollars per click that resulted in a bad time. I guess this is my fault, not realizing it was unsustainable.

then I moved on to "content marketing" and "selling before you have a product" and I also struggled. Spending hours and $$$ on content that nobody even read or saw. Without a product I could not even get past "do you have a demo".

This road is full of pitfalls, false promises and outright gambling at times. I wish I had the resources I have now to spray and pray (try everything and see what sticks literally).

I wish I could just hire somebody like you hire coders. The difficulty comes from not knowing if this marketer is just blowing hot air or know what they are doing. Obviously, past performance helps but I find it a lot easier to find coders vs sales & marketing ppl.

No 2 businesses are alike, no 2 industries are alike, no 2 consumer profiles are alike. There is no silver bullet to solving this problem. One thing I have noticed is you really need to understand the buyer deeply - this is most easy if you yourself want this product, but failing that, studying your buyer as much as possible. When you really get into the head of the buyer you may figure out a channel to sell that is un-obvious.

Marketing is an art - truth be told, all of business is an art, which is why expertise is valued so highly. The moment something becomes commoditized is the moment you no longer need experts and the solutions are widespread.

If you are bootstrapping, I think it's easiest to actually have a bare-minimum product first. This is a risk - you need to put the time and effort into building something to sell. If you yourself are not an engineer, then it becomes even harder.

If you aren't going to bootstrap, then you need to have connections. At this point in my career if I chose to start a new company in the area where I am well-known and successful, raising a few million dollars for a seed round would be easy. But this is after more than a decade of building contacts, reputation, and so on - if I was just starting out, that would be impossible.

Starting a new, successful business is a puzzle. If it was easy, it wouldn't be rewarding. Good luck!

very nicely put. at different stages of the poker tournament (time), chips (funds), cards (strategy), your behavior and options drastically differ.

and I think back to your point about knowing the buyer being critical. there is also a huge barrier/cost to acquiring that information in some spaces, and often you can get false signals from your potential buyers.

As engineers than the best products we create is the one we solve for ourselves. My strength is not in cold calling/reaching out to ppl on linkedin/customer development interviews. It's intuition.

but does it affect the outcome, does having a stronger intuition and your discipline to follow it result in a successful outcome compared to when you don't? I think the question is then what comes first, luck or intuition?

Another option if you are the technical talent is to find someone you trust to partner with on the business side. I highly recommend partnering with someone you have worked with before to ensure you can get along with them, but failing that, someone with reputation - they have had true success in the past and have people who can vouch for them.

Your world view is contradictory.

Is success mostly luck? Or is it mostly skill?

You repeatedly state that it's mostly luck. A poker tournament.

At the same time you believe some marketers are better than others and want to hire the good ones.

So it must be mostly skill. But you said business success is luck. Hire random people as marketers, random people as programmers. It doesn't matter if they have skill since it's all luck anyway.

It need not be mutually exclusive. For instance, poker tournament isn't quite like a game of roulettes, there is skill involved, and there is luck involved.

At any given time, the proportion of skill/luck can wildly fluctuate and is not know until a result is observed.

so while I recognize I need skilled people to increase my probability, I am cognizant also of the uncertainty or luck factor.

Hey I feel like I’m on ending on this path as an engineer would love to email some questions and have a convo if possible. Email in my bio