You know what actually drives product innovation? Not being able to lean on advertising to drive sales, so you're actually forced to improve your product and get the benefit of positive word of mouth instead.
Yes, talking about or inserting something into conversation is promoting. It's advertising. And guess what--almost none of your users or buyers are going to say a word about your product.
People need to stop believing this stuff and just accept the dirty fact that if you want something to get used, you HAVE to advertise. You HAVE to promote.
Edit: You know what word of mouth is? Worthless for people who don't have eyeballs on a product.
Go read around HN and tell me about a product you just heard about being praised that you don't already know about today that is not already the de facto solution or product in a space.
You know what word of mouth is? Word of mouth is a signal you have already won. It is absolutely nothing for growth.
Once you've got some interest bootstrapped, you CAN in fact rely on unprompted word of mouth for growth. My users and buyers spread the word about my product simply because they find it useful. Many bring it to their new employer when they switch jobs.
So no, I disagree with the blanket position that you have to advertise -- especially in the intrusive fashion that's the subject of the article -- to get people to use your product. (Though I don't dispute that doing so can be a good shortcut.)
But all that is irrelevant to my claim above: my position is simply that a dearth of advertising options is what drives product innovation, by necessity. And hence, limiting advertising is likely to actually be good for consumers.
Bootstrapping only works if you haven't taken on much debt to finance the development and manufacturing of the product. Software can be developed with very little debt (which is what I did).
It is difficult to raise awareness for it. Newsletters, blogs, demo videos, presenting at conferences, etc. are all means for trying to spread the word. I have considered taking out some paid advertisements, but you wonder if anyone but bots will actually see them.
We don't expect a small company to be able to make a Hollywood movie, or a new medicine... and that's just fine, isn't it?
As a customer, I'm tired of hearing this excuse. I get wowed by free, open-source software dozens of times a week. You want me to put eyes on your product? Wow me! I'm tired of "enterprise-grade fart apps" and "B2C photo storage" garbage getting touted as life-changing or impressive technology. If you want to compete, do something impressive. If you want people to look fondly upon your product, consider giving back to the community instead of paying to become their adversary.
I use four big fat codebases (browser, OS, etc); maybe 10 decently-sized language runtimes like the JVM; and then 800+ rinky-dink CLI utilities. Half of which came from a Github Gist, or which I had to compile from source from a repo containing just some bare source files and no documentation. Yet many of these little CLI utilities individually take up just as much mental space as my browser or OS does; and I get just as much use out of them professionally as I do my browser or OS. (In fact often more, because many of these utilities are multi-platform, such that I use them regardless of which browser or OS I happen to be using.)
When I joined the company some years ago, we were the 5th largest in our sector. We since grew to 2nd largest using almost entirely word of mouth for sales. We didn't have any dedicated sales people, and did hardly any advertising.
Instead, users would call friends in the industry and tell them to get our software. If they switched jobs they'd persuade their new boss to get our software.
Since reaching #2 spot we got some sales and marketing people, and we're now at the top.
So while I'll disagree that word of mouth can't be used for growth, I've seen first hand how good sales and marketing can put you on a steeper curve.
Easy. This morning in the "Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?" thread I saw multiple users mentioning a open source project I have never heard of but seemed very close to what i was looking for. I have it now running since 12 hours and I already recommended a friend to check it out.
I reckon about 70% of things I use are from recommendations of people (but usually not from the internet). From what command-line shell I use to what music I listen to.
I don't recall seeing TikTok billboards or banner ads.
I've never seen a Tesla ad.
Did Facebook advertise? Instagram?
GMail throttled demand with limited invitations.
Until this week you had to apply to get a Dall-E login. Heard of it?
Rolls-Royce and Tupperware do not advertise.
I'm not saying advertising isn't important for products. But it's easy to find enormously-grown counterexamples to your blanket claim.
Tesla used to run billboards in LA and SF and paid influencers to shill their cars. They still market quite heavily today though not through billboards (AI Day is a marketing event.)
GMails invitation system was it's marketing, back in the day when people were excited about Google products.
Rolls Royce sponsors athletes, which is considered marketing. They also bring cars to auto shows and to various events targeted to the luxury crowd.
Tupperware's original business model was literally 100% about marketing. Most people would call it a multi level marketing scheme today.
For me the only advertising I see is on billboards because I never watch live TV either (and haven't for years). And many products are way too niche to advertise that way.
This group will get ever larger because it's just a great thing to live in an advertising-free world. If your business can't cope with it I would suggest making that a priority to adjust to :)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/286448/largest-global-ad...
You were telling someone that he's out of touch for thinking that he can sell a product on word of mouth alone. I'm providing evidence that he can sell a product through word of mouth because I bought his product based on word of mouth.
Whether or not you've also heard of his product is irrelevant. There's a near infinite number of successful products in the world that you've never heard of, so you being unaware of a particular product does not indicate anything about whether that product is successful.
No, but the two barber-shops in towns spending $X each on net-even advertising is a net-negative for me, because the only thing I get out of it is a higher bill when I cut my hair.
Some advertisement creates new markets. Some is a negative-sum game. None of it can be assumed to be honest, because of the obvious profit motive involved.
Who do you assume to be honest? The politician wanting your vote? The prospective employee telling you about his job skills? The public schools telling you they do a great job? Dr. Fauci? The customer who tells you "the check is in the mail"?
You can get all philosophical and start splitting hairs about what we can truly know, but whatever it is, I doubt I'll find it in an ad.
If advertising were toned down a couple orders of magnitude, word of mouth might actually get more traction.
Even if I leave room that advertising (and capitalism) is the only stable system, that doesn't mean it can't be limited and restricted for better outcomes for people on the whole.
I get if you're trying to starve for a buck out here in a crowded space like tech, but on the consumer side of things I have never put deep use in any product that was marketed (i.e. someone paid for it to get to my eyeballs.)
It may be true that for a bunch of you to make money, you need to put money in marketing. But for us who want good products, marketing mostly only gets in our way. Good products really do sell themselves with word of mouth, or me actively seeking out good things.
It's now one of the most successful games ever made. The advertising did nothing to hurt innovation, and in fact proved Rockstar's hypothesis that the market is ready for this kind of innovation, but needs to be sold on the idea.
The space of advertising decisions is high-dimensional and dependent on too many factors to succumb to generalization. Many awesome businesses have thrived without it; others would've starved without it.
This is misleading. Ad networks were defrauding Uber by generating fake clicks so such that organic installs of Uber would be attributed to these ad networks despite the install not being from an ad.
The problem was the ad networks and not advertising itself.
Those two notions aren’t the same, nor interchangeable. Advertising is about pushing something to a public and expanding the attention the product receives. “ There's no such thing as bad publicity” is advertising.
Promoting is about making a product’s (alleged)merits better known and enticing people to use said product for their benefit.
As a society, we want promotion, not advertisement.
Why don't you want to tell more people about it - wouldn't that help them? (and you?)
Seriously asking - like I get it if you only want to make $x and call it a day but can you help me understand why you wouldn't want to help more people with your superior offer?
So yes, it's certainly possible that advertising raises the overall well-being of the recipients, but it's by no means a given.
If you don't try to reach them - your inferior competitors will. Then you and your potential users are both worse off
I opt to keep growing
Imagine a small cake shop running a Superbowl ad. That'd be dumb, right? Even if they had the money to run the ad, they can't fulfill the number of orders that ad would generate.
Most companies do not and cannot "go viral"
that is a fantasy for most offers. Unfortunately it's just not that easy
There's a reason that millions of Americans work in some form of sales. At big, medium, and small companies of all types. It's not an accident or a mistake actually. Any offer worth enough profit to be worth a human pitching it will get pitched - and so too will many offers that aren't worth pitching for that matter
Per-unit-amortized CapEx costs, sorry. (Typo.) Think: labor acquisition costs when you're providing a high-touch service. You can only hire so fast. Or acquisition/expansion costs for facilities and capital equipment (factory mechanization), in the case of the small bakery. You can only make so many cakes per hour, by hand, in a room of a given size.
And it's 100% true. Look at any consultant. Look at any maker of artisanal goods. If you have "inelastic supply", then there is a certain amount of demand that is saturating, at which point you don't need any more demand — you only need better demand. Every customer you acquire from that point on replaces a lower-value customer on your fixed timetable. Untargeted outreach (advertising) does nothing to make that happen. You need targeted outreach (sales) at that point. Or just some very aggressive lead-qualification of your organic inbound traffic.
The reason a local bake shop doesn't do superbowl spots is because they're wasting their spend on millions of people who their offer is irrelevant to. I don't think it's because they can't scale up to fulfill
there could be local bakeshops that advertise on local tv or a billboard for example. But bakeshops don't usually make enough profit to justify these efforts
to further emphasize this point - there's no rule a company has to fulfill an order on their own. if you can't figure out how to fulfill - many companies will sub that work out/outsource it. the highest touch services - think biglaw partners - those type businesses don't really scale and are more jobs than actual businesses
> if you can't figure out how to fulfill - many companies will sub that work out/outsource it
Yeah, but if they're coming to you, specifically, it's probably not just because you've ran a superbowl ad, but also because you're offering something nobody else does offer, or is set up to offer, or even knows how to offer.
If you ran a superbowl ad for your little sandwich shop, that wouldn't make a million people interested in flying out to you to get sandwiches; your sandwiches are probably good, but so are many people's — there's no USP to what you're doing. Sandwiches are fungible-enough that the ad will just make people want a sandwich from their own local place.
But, well — you know the "pink sauce" lady? She's got a USP. You can't get pink sauce anywhere but her (for now.) And she's certainly trying to outsource her production to a big condiment corp, due to the massive accidental viral demand she's triggered for her product; but there wasn't anyone already set up to make pink sauce, so she couldn't actually just turn around and immediately buy it on the market, or subcontract its production (AFAIK there's no "condiments mixed to order" job-shop factory; only "we put your label on our pre-made condiments" factories.) Right now, she's just trying to meet millions of orders from all over the US, from her kitchen, and everything's going to hell as a result.
BMW doesn't really need to advertise as their new cars are only affordable for a small subset of the population. They advertise to re-enforce to their customers they made a great decision parting with their money.
Some things really don't need innovation.
New Coke was actually decently successful in the rest of the world; and especially in younger, more urban markets — i.e. the markets Pepsi is more popular in. New Coke did exactly what it was designed to do: steal market share from Pepsi.
Coke's mistake was never really in launching New Coke. Their mistake was in removing the "old" Coke at the same time. If New Coke was positioned differently — not as a replacement for Coke, but just as a "kind" of Coke (like Coke Zero is a "kind of" Coke), they would have cleaned up.