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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I think this can be further generalized as – advertising and marketing are as important as building the product itself. Too many people (especially engineers) think that if you create something that is 10% better than the existing mainstream solution then the entire user base will flock to you overnight, but in reality no one will care because no one will know about it.

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Not only that, but even if I *do* know about it, I still won't want to use it. I already know the old mainstream thing. 10% efficiency gains isn't enough for me to invest my limited time in learning a new tool, platform, data model, etc. 70%, 80%? Maybe then, but I'd still be suspicious.

What usually does cause me to adopt something new is 2+ co-worker / colleague recommendations. For example, I would never have started using k9s until 2+ colleagues started to hound me to stop typing out kubectl commands and to switch to k9s ASAP.

just being a stickler here but 10% is probably enough

If it's consistently 10% better, and every other aspect remains the same.

Paul Graham would say for exponential growth, 10x better is the bar

This is really important. One of my friends worked in a startup, an online retail store similar to Amazon, and it came out before Amazon) but the marketing wasn't there, so that service failed.

Nobody knew about it, so it didn't make any profit. Great concept? Absolutely! Look at Amazon today.

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