[porridgeraisin]

> if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.

Such zero value activities are a plague on the economy and the whole world. Obviously the equivalents in the e.g financial sector have more impact than some node.js developer going off on linkedin about the MANGO stack or whatever and spamming people about some crap newsletter, but it's this same mentality that is a cancer on society. And yes, all of marketing and sales and ads (the way it is done today) is a cancer in my opinion.

> winning on linkedin

> push them to

* vomits *

> millions of dollars

dirty money.

</rant>

[oytis]

I must say, working on a project with weak marketing and sales support is pretty depressing, especially if the engineering itself is good

[porridgeraisin]

Yeah, the thing is that if one person starts doing it, everyone else must as well if they want to compete, regardless of intentions, so it becomes a tragedy of the commons sort of thing.

[cpursley]

If it leads to someone purchasing a solution that solves a need, how is that zero value?

[olex]

If someone has a legitimate need, they will look for a solution in appropriate locations (directories, search, magazines, what have you) and do not need someone to scream their marketing blurbs into the void in hopes of being noticed.

[donkers]

And marketing folks would be involved in getting the product into directories, search, magazines, etc. What is it that you think marketing people do? They don't write ad copy all day.

[jmye]

Right??? Why did Uber ever advertise! Everyone who needed a cab but was tired of cab companies could’ve just like, searched the internet for “service to connect me with normal people who will take me places in their own car” which was also obviously a solution that existed and everyone would’ve known to search for!

Brilliant.

[CER10TY]

Or, far more likely, they'll reach out to someone in their network. To land in that network, you have to market your services. LinkedIn is somewhat useful for that, but less so nowadays.

[cpursley]

Only a certain percentage of potential buyers activity look for a solution. Even Apple advertises.

[cma]

As a counter example to the logic, not saying linkedin is this, smashing up someone's stuff could also make them need to buy new stuff to solve a need but wouldn't in any way provide value.

[spaqin]

Are you sure they actually needed it, rather than got sold on something that wasn't really a problem before?

[sklargh]

This is a prevailing opinion within a substantial minority of HN’s population. I am curious, how would you do it differently?

[cpursley]

They wouldn't, they work for someone else and are isolated from the revenue making part of the operation. And the largest anti marketing screamers are often high paid devs part of VC funded companies that don't actually make any money (this is a VC forum, after all). Outside of the valley bubble, for those of us running profitable business, we have to find sustainable channels that work and get the word out. That said, there's a reasonable middle ground between being sleazy and scammy and actually offering value.

[spaqin]

Turns out you can work on something you don't really believe in as long as the money is good.