Marketing is probably more important than the product itself

Product/Service = Sustain Customers.

Both are important but marketing is where you start. You can fix a shitty product with great marketing but if you don't fix your marketing, even a great product will fail.

When you use a great product, you tell others. Then they tell someone. And so on. Your product develops a reputation. “The taco stand down the street has killer tacos” or “People like me use products like this.”

If nobody wants to recommend your product to others, if nobody wants to rave about your services, then your product isn’t remarkable. Great products market themselves.

Logistics and supply chain is more important than marketing because without product to ship, you'll go broke before you can bill your customers.

Server ops is more important than logistics and supply chain because if your servers are always down, no one can buy your product.

It's like saying that the engine of your car is more important than the transmission. You need both.

Apple in the late 90s had the same marketing they always had, and they were dying. Google in the late 90s had no marketing, and a product so good it made all other search engines obsolete overnight.

How many shitty products are dominating the world, just look around.

And how many awesome startups with great products died.

Product just needs to be “good enough” to not break the market fit of a company.

All the rest depends on marketing/sales.

That’s the brutal truth.

Before you start using Apple as counter example — check how much they spend on marketing.

And how cool they organized iPhone distribution and sales even before iPhone matured to be really good product.