I was listening to a Q&A with a famous silicon valley entrepreneur about building products that users love.
An audience member asked how much you should focus on the product vs. how much time you should spend marketing. This is valid question in most contexts, but in this case it missed the point of the whole lecture!
For 45 minutes Kevin Hale talked about building a product USERS love, not keeping your head down and making whatever the founders want to code.
The lecture explicitly said that Wufoo didn’t pay for marketing because users talked about how great the product was.
Word of mouth is the most efficient form of marketing, but it’s not easy to achieve. It’s even harder when we separate product and marketing into different discussions and teams. Then we end up wanting answers to our binary problem of “product or marketing?”
The correct answer is both and neither.
Your company is based on a story. The product is part of that story, the marketing materials are part of that story and so is everything else you create. Know your story and tell it to the world.
Develop a story so compelling that users have to share it with their friends.