i literally did nothing different. sometimes i ponder whether capitalism really is the result of dice rolling and the participant thinks they have greater influence than they really do.
While simple, this is not an easy call to make, I imagine.
To me markets look like evolution processes: there's definitely a vector towards better efficiency, better "fitness", but the trajectory is more like a random walk than a targeted shot.
With that, markets fail, but all highly-planned regimes have historically failed even worse.
What I take from this is that one should not emotionally invest in a business, and not make a serious business out of things that one has emotionally invested in. Be curious, try things and see if they work. Many of the best-looking of them won't; some of the sillies of them will.
The most ambitious people used to be conquerors, trying to force humanity into subjugation to rule as much as possible.
Now, the most ambitious people do everything they can to solve problems, as that is how you gain the most resources and personal wealth.
The end result is the capitalists that win, win big. But to me this is far superior than the alternative.
The “dice rolling” process you feel is random can be studied and optimized to increase your chances of success, either with better targeting or with more dice rolls. This is the product development process and the risk involved is why creators of successful businesses deserve huge rewards.
Again I compare it to something like poker tournament. In the beginning you are trying to build enough chips to get ahead the pack, there are lot of failures, risks are unknown
There is all manner of marketing possible at all price points. Just hitting up your network is marketing. I have successfully sold products by having people answer questions all day every day to the long tail of Reddit comments in honest ways explaining how our product solves their problem.
then I moved on to "content marketing" and "selling before you have a product" and I also struggled. Spending hours and $$$ on content that nobody even read or saw. Without a product I could not even get past "do you have a demo".
This road is full of pitfalls, false promises and outright gambling at times. I wish I had the resources I have now to spray and pray (try everything and see what sticks literally).
I wish I could just hire somebody like you hire coders. The difficulty comes from not knowing if this marketer is just blowing hot air or know what they are doing. Obviously, past performance helps but I find it a lot easier to find coders vs sales & marketing ppl.
Marketing is an art - truth be told, all of business is an art, which is why expertise is valued so highly. The moment something becomes commoditized is the moment you no longer need experts and the solutions are widespread.
If you are bootstrapping, I think it's easiest to actually have a bare-minimum product first. This is a risk - you need to put the time and effort into building something to sell. If you yourself are not an engineer, then it becomes even harder.
If you aren't going to bootstrap, then you need to have connections. At this point in my career if I chose to start a new company in the area where I am well-known and successful, raising a few million dollars for a seed round would be easy. But this is after more than a decade of building contacts, reputation, and so on - if I was just starting out, that would be impossible.
Starting a new, successful business is a puzzle. If it was easy, it wouldn't be rewarding. Good luck!
and I think back to your point about knowing the buyer being critical. there is also a huge barrier/cost to acquiring that information in some spaces, and often you can get false signals from your potential buyers.
As engineers than the best products we create is the one we solve for ourselves. My strength is not in cold calling/reaching out to ppl on linkedin/customer development interviews. It's intuition.
but does it affect the outcome, does having a stronger intuition and your discipline to follow it result in a successful outcome compared to when you don't? I think the question is then what comes first, luck or intuition?
Is success mostly luck? Or is it mostly skill?
You repeatedly state that it's mostly luck. A poker tournament.
At the same time you believe some marketers are better than others and want to hire the good ones.
So it must be mostly skill. But you said business success is luck. Hire random people as marketers, random people as programmers. It doesn't matter if they have skill since it's all luck anyway.
At any given time, the proportion of skill/luck can wildly fluctuate and is not know until a result is observed.
so while I recognize I need skilled people to increase my probability, I am cognizant also of the uncertainty or luck factor.