You read something, you think you got the point but this might not be the case. You would get the eureka moment later when you experience what you read and that's when you truly understand it. The same thing happened to me. I had read about marketing but never understand it importance. Now when it's time to spread the word about Dredge, I realized its significance much better.
The theory that you build a great product and everybody begins using it, is flawed. The product does not succeed on it own, the founders drive it to success by various means and one of them is marketing. I once read somewhere:
- bad product + great marketing = success
- good product + bad marketing = failure
- good product + good marketing = huge success
It seems the case. Bad movies with great marketing do wonders on box office, bad books with strong promotions sells thousands of copies. Now i understand why there are so many builders are on twitter, trying to gain follower, spend considerable amount of time engaging with them -- so they can at least pull off great marketing.
What is marketing? I think it is about making enough number of right people to know about a product or service.
I am wondering, what are the question one need to ask before building the product. The first question for sure, is whether I could build it or not? I had many instance when idea failed to materialize hence I had to abandon it. The second, as I understand now, is whether I could market it or not? By that I mean, do I have means to reach the target user? If not, then I should not build it.