[jasonthorsness]

My heart still wants to believe that if you build a great product the users will appear like the old pre-scientific "spontaneous generation" philosophy around how mice appear. But it definitely doesn't work like that.

In some sense it's adversarial like trading/investing, people who have a working strategy can't share it or it won't work anymore.

But the bread-and-butter is probably setting it up correctly to facilitate word-of-mouth, influencers, ads in communities your users frequent.

[PaulHoule]

I'd say "marketing is hard". It's easy to fault advocacy organizations that spend 90% of their donations on fundraising and overhead but it's the way that it is.

When I was in college I was the PR manager for college radio station KTEK which was notorious for having dances where hardly anyone showed up. My prescription was plastering the campus (2000 students or so) with a ream of paper worth of posters with 15 different designs. Our DJ crew was great so we retained people once they came, but it took about two years of that to get to the place where people expected a KTEK dance to be hopping.

My expectation is that if I tasked a young person with that kind of marketing task today they'd make one poster, put up four of them, and have some excuse like "anybody who wanted that information would seek it out." Doesn't work that way.

[zy5a59]

You're right. For me, development is way easier than marketing and promotion.