If you read the financials from most software companies that are public you'll see that marketing costs are way higher than development and maintenance costs. It's the primary way to get customers to buy or use your app.
I think the marketing plan is part of the project design - you should have it before you build it. Are you targeting remote workers? That should be part of the UI, the features, etc. Do you plan on marketing via social media? Your app should have lots of share buttons and the formatting of the content should be shareable.
Every time someone brings up the discussion of whether an app is web, iOS, or Android, my answer is always how that links to marketing. Some people are better at some forms of marketing, and that has to be in synergy with the product.
However, if you need to throw money at it, it's also likely not doing a great job. Sites like Google and Facebook launched with no paid marketing, even though they spend a good amount of money marketing now. It's not that they didn't have money, but not using paid advertising is a good way to gauge how strong your product is and give you time to patch it.
The latter case is when marketing is a lot more integrated with building the product. If you’ve made it all the way to a public release but don’t really know how to market, then there is a dangerously high probability that you built something nobody really asked for.
There are plenty of reasons you need to throw money at it. For example, if the distribution is made by a third party (like Steam, if the project was a game), you're literally paying Steam to get your game distributed - and you could have a great game.
I don't think Google and Facebook are the best examples, because the internet was quite a different place when they launched.
But also marketing seems like a money black hole to me. I could sink tons of money into marketing and have little to show for it.
The marketing is critical but I’m just saying there is a cost also
It’s like waiting to build the backend until the frontend is 100% complete. While building assumptions change based on things you learn. Marketing for your product works the same way.
By putting the effort into marketing (meaning any form of reaching out: blog posts, direct sales, social media or even paid) you might even avoiding building features that nobody wanted anyway.
> It’s like waiting to build the backend until the frontend is 100% complete
It's more like building a backend, then realising that the data structures could be improved when you're building the front. Marketing at best provides enhancements, not core changes (unless your product itself was incorrect to begin with).
Honestly, if your marketing affects your product as much as you're suggesting, you have a pretty unstable product.
Marketing is about exposing your product to your target customers. It's relatively orthogonal to product features.
By overly internally inconsistent I mean that at some places they will be impossible to fulfill. The code will always breaking at edge cases. The ui will do three things at the same time, will be incoherent and will be complicated for user to understand and learn.
By complicated I mean that you will have to code super complicated hard to maintain structures to fulfill everything at the same time.
Marketing can not be requirements gathering, because marketing is motivated to promise everything to everybody and to exaggerate. I dont use exaggerate here as euphemism for "lie" through that happens too. Exaggerating itself is a problem. Marketing is not motivated to build coherent analysis.
I know because I worked on projects where marketing was driving requirements . It did not led to happy customers, because customers were unhappy over instability and our inability to fill their requirements in a reasonable way.
I feel what you are talking about is a siloed approach where developers build what the marketing team promises to customers. If these teams are the same people you are the developer and marketing team, and thus over-promising things to customers is only shooting yourself in the foot.
More like - if you have an idea for a commercial website or app or something, it's best to start by finding potential customers, building relationships with them, and getting to know what they actually need and are willing to pay for. This is much more important than what language and framework to use, how you'll host it, and other technical decisions. Do the research first to figure out if people are willing to pay for your idea in a form that's in your "runway" budget of what you can afford to build and run before you get money coming in.
It's also perfectly fine to build something without that to try out a new tech you think is interesting, or to scratch a personal itch, etc. Just don't expect to bring in any money with it without doing that research.
Also if you want to hit the ground running marketing can be developing plans for some time ahead of launch.
As for a black hole of money, it can be. Any area is if spent poorly. A failed product is a development money pit.
Marketing should be looked at like an investment, not a cost. Track your activities and if a dollar spent brings back more than a dollar, spend more and see where it plateaus. And vice versa, stop spending or find another channel/marketer. Ive seen developer lead companies looking at marketing as a cost line reject budget increases even with marketing showing a dollar spent was directly returning significantly more. I've also seen money shoveled into the furnace. Marketing is not just good/bad, it's recognising good marketing and bad marketing.