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by lalokaya 1903 days ago
"Build it and they will come" doesn't work anymore.

I see way too many people have killer skills to build something wonderful, but don't execute much when it comes to marketing. The reasons are plentiful: marketing is boring, it's a sleazy game, I don't want to spam people, I don't know how to, etc. That's why sometimes you see people that are good at marketing/sales out-succeed those that are great at building.

These days you gotta take people by the hand and bring them to your product (esp at the beginning). At worst, you're going to learn. At best, you'll get new customers.

Looking at what others are doing, I'd say it takes an equal amount (or more) of time and effort, to tell people about your product, as it does to build it. And it's a continuous thing, there's never an end to it.

So just like you develop the product and learn what it takes to build the best version of it, plan on telling people that it actually exists. You got tons of platforms for that. I've started Polyzag [0] to educate people (and learn myself), about how other profitable companies do just that.

It's a skill that you can learn, just like dev'ing.

P.S: Bonus points if you level up on marketing yourself w/o a co-founder. It's a superpower.

[0] https://polyzag.com/

2 comments

> "Build it and they will come" doesn't work anymore.

Did it ever? I feel like this omits the mechanism for people to get to know there is something to come to and reasons for them to come. Not sure why this saying really exists.

If someone builds a pile of garbage, I won't come, even if I knew about it, and I definitely won't be telling other people about it either.

EDIT: so the phrase is a variation on some phrase from a film from the 1980s where some guy was having auditory hallucinations ... https://samuelmullen.com/articles/startup-fallacies-if-you-b...

The saying from the movie Field of Dreams, wherein a mentally ill man hallucinates a voice telling him to build a baseball field for ghosts.

The quote is only applicable to people who are building baseball fields for ghosts.

I have visited that specific baseball diamond in the corn fields of Iowa and it's pretty much a ghost town, so I don't think it works even then.
It used to be trivial to rank well in search engines with minimal effort, so if "build it" includes the few seconds to submit to one search engine, yeah, it used to work. You could buy a 2-3 word keyphrase domain, submit it to Google and get traffic for a few minutes of work. I used to rank top 1-2 in my country for "make money" with a random single page site I built in 30 minutes. Had another site (which took half a day to build) make $20k/y with zero ongoing effort.
I disagree to some degree. If you understand some seo and place your link in a few stratetic positions they will come. My last saas got like 70% of its customers straight from google search. All it needed was time and some smart backlinks.