Building a great product only gets you 20% there

I have had the privilege of working with a lot of great people over the years. Starting my career at Idealab was like drinking from a fire hose. One of my favorite business comments from an early CEO of mine:

‘Business is 4 equal parts; product, marketing, collecting money and timing/luck. They are all critical and very often, not in your control’

This article should have a thousand upvotes and comments praising it. But too many devs think the opposite, that only a good product is worthy of success, and that it’s easy if you just make a good product.

The reality is that marketing, support, distribution all matter more in the long run. I’ve been one of those engineers saying my app is so great, where are the customers? The customers were going to the apps worse than mine because those founders knew how to sell.

Developers at times can undervalue the role other key contributing team of the business play. Accounting, marketing, finance and support resources are all critical to the success of a firm.

recently launched a product i knew was great, people who have bought it sing its praises, 0 negative feedback.

sales were not terrible, but they were about 10x worse than I was hoping for.

I took the "focus on the product, customers will come" aphorism a bit too literally.

Marketing does not magically happen yet it's easy to ignore.

Obviously i knew this but it took experiencing it myself to fully believe it. Hard lesson.