Somewhere right now, a founder is explaining that they don’t really need to do much marketing. The product is good. Good products spread. Build the better mousetrap and the world beats a path to your door.
The product graveyard is full of better mousetraps nobody ever heard of.
The conviction I’ll keep repeating for the next five years is a plain one: building a great product is not a marketing strategy. Distribution, demand and the buying experience are the business. They are not the afterthought you bolt on once the real work is finished. They are the real work.
“If you build it, they will come”
was Ray Kinsella talking to a cornfield.
It’s not a strategy for getting paying customers.
Why the better product keeps losing
Every category leader you can name spent serious senior attention on how their thing got found, got sold and got bought again. Not junior attention. Not “we’ll sort marketing out later” attention. The founder’s own time, early, on the unglamorous question of how a stranger discovers you exist and then decides to pay you.
The shift happens when a founder stops treating demand as something that happens to a good product, and starts building it on purpose. The product still has to be good. Of course it does. But good is the price of entry, not the plan.
“We tried marketing once and it didn’t work”
When a founder tells me marketing didn’t work for them, I’ve learned to ask what they actually ran. It’s usually one of two things. A burst of activity with no commercial goal attached to it. Or a channel switched on for six weeks and switched off again before it could teach them anything. That isn’t marketing failing. That’s marketing not being done.
It’s the same reason most growth-hacking advice quietly disappoints. The tactics work when there’s already a pool of demand to redirect. Drop the same playbook into a category that has never heard of you, and you’re optimising the conversion of traffic that was never going to arrive. A clever funnel can’t fix an empty top of it.
Build it. Then go and get them.
None of this is a knock on founders. The instinct that makes someone obsess over the product is the same instinct that makes the product worth selling in the first place. We like founders. We just disagree with one of the stories the culture tells them: that distribution is a tax on great products, rather than the thing that decides whether anyone ever gets to call them great.
So build it. By all means, build something brilliant. Then go and get the customers. They were never in the cornfield.