I say depressing because most software developers didn't choose their profession out of a burning desire to become a marketer.
I take a lot of pride in promoting my products. Marketing is just storytelling, and when your story aligns with the needs of someone else, a transaction occurs.
Honestly, if you want to just write code all day (and there's nothing wrong with that) don't create a product - work for somebody else.
Saying that joining a marketing person or hiring one is not the recipe for building a business. Realize that a business is not solely its marketing, nor programming. You cannot just take a program and market it, and become rich. Not so easy. It takes a lot of hustle (which is not marketing), and luck.
I see no reason why software developers and marketing people shouldn't start a startup together. Both have something valuable they can contribute.
And the dismissive "I'll just hire a marketer" talk sounds a lot like the marketer saying "I'll just hire a programmer".
It seems like we're in full agreement: these two functions can and should co-exist.
This was supposed to be snarky but it's actually a great analogy. There are many people who would love to be able to skip all the go out-meet-impress-pickup courting rituals and get right into a relationship, just like there are many devs who would love for their product to sell itself on its own merits. Usually doesn't work very well in either case but that's not to dismiss this particular wishful thinking.
this is exactly correct. it is the same reason why so many restaurants fail; somebody says "hey, im a good cook, why dont i start a restaurant?" if you are a good cook and dont know how to run a business, become a chef. if you are a good coder and dont know how to run a business, work for somebody else. business is about way more than just creating a good product. for true, lasting success a good product is almost always needed, but what good is a good product if you dont know how to get anybody to know it exists?
The depressing truth about the software business is that most of the success stories take the form "and then I started spending all my time on marketing, and my business took off!".
What's depressing is this line of thinking. You just can't program something and expect people to buy it. You have to sell it.
Good programming is the search for The Right Way to solve a particular problem, Truth if you will. Marketing and sales seem to be about un-Truth. It is little wonder that there are so many programmers who look at sales/marketing with disdain.
That's how I've made lots of money.
How you are describing "marketing" is actually "marketing" as you describe it -- simplified, glossed over, and half-true at best.
On the other hand, check out patio11's Lifecycle Emails page for frank honesty such as:
"Do you not have a shipped product yet? Ship something. Do not buy this course. Well-implemented lifecycle emails do not ship software."
Or, on the sales page for my class,
"If you can’t make these chats on a regular basis, you should not attend."
Where's the sexy ego-revving in these simple statements?
- You have a steady job, but nobody will sell you a car? If you can get some proof of employment I will sel lyou a car. Today!
- Tired of paying a lot of money for quality web hosting? Don't want to deal with the hassle of a VPS? If yu are willing to get your fingers dirty every few weeks in exchange of great prices, service and flexibility, then you might want to look us up. wonderfullyawesomesuperwebhosting.com is the addres you might want to visit right now. Or dont.
It's extremely telling that you consider this to be an accurate description of marketing.
There are lots of bad programmers and lots of bad marketers (hard to say which are in more abundant supply). It may seem like there are more bad marketers, since we're more likely to be aware when we see "deceptions and half-truths" in sales/marketing... after all, we're very likely to be exposed to marketing in our daily life.
When you get down to it though, a really good programmer and a really good marketer are both rare commodities. Marketing is not inherently more evil than programming. They are just both usually done poorly, and we all suffer as a result.
That's life. Being ultra logical is the slimy oddity, not the nitty gritty of life.
When you're dating, applying for a job, or trying to get elected as town mayor, you don't throw it all on the table right away and say, hey, I've got a bowel problem, I occasionally pleasure myself to pictures of vegetables, and I have a prescription drug habit.. even though all of us have various things of this nature under our hats (well, maybe not the vegetable one..)
Marketing is mostly about deception and half-truths, and promoting a product effectively means maximizing the positives and minimizing/omitting the negatives: "Look at this shiny car!" (engine leaks oil) "Buy our shiny lightweight computer!" (can't change battery) etc...
Marketing is about showcasing the world your ideas. It is not about deception, although some people do deceieve others through it. Real marketing, the one you and me experience at a hundred percent is something that you don't realize exists. You never heard it. Saw it. Or even thought of it. It simply resonates with your ideas, your self, and your values. The aroma of a pure rythmic parallelism between us and what we want to become. That is marketing.
In the 1980's, when Steve Jobs set out to market Apple, he understood the true meaning of marketing. Jobs set out to showcase the world the ideas behind Apple. That is why the original series of advertisements set out to show Apple as more than a computer company. It was an idea. A new idea. The computer did not have to be boring, or tied down to social structures. It was fun. Modern. The future. Apple was about freedom from the regular business computer. That idea is still living these days in the form of iDevices and Macs. In a world of boring Windows-based PCs, the Apple computer and device are still showcasing the original Apple idea. There is a better way to use technology. Such way is the Apple way (according to their marketing, not my opinion).
Did it work for Apple? Yes. Did Jobs set out to deceive people? No. Could they have sold millions and millions of devices based on a marketing lie? No.
The problem with us hackers is that we tend to forget that the world is not all black and white. Not every salesman is out to get us. Some really do want to help us. Like that insurance agent selling Cancer policies. Go ahead and talk to one of them. Ask them how many people has the policies he sells saved from starving. How many children will have an education or even a roof to live because their deceased parent bought a Cancer policy from him/her. For a programmer, a Cancer policy is just a lottery. For the rest of the world, it can be the difference between life and death. That is why they are marketed like that. It is real.
Although it's easy to see why you would think this, it is a misconception that is costing you dearly, in ways you don't even understand yet.
I highly recommend you get a copy of "Three Steps to Yes: The Gentle Art of Getting Your Way" by Gene Bedell. He applies the same sales principles to any social situation where you're trying to get your way, whether convincing a partner to go on vacation to your chosen destination or selling software.
Suppose your partner just wants to tan at the beach, but you want to go rock climbing. Crucially, they may not want to admit (even to themselves) that this is what they want. A bit of empathy and creative thinking can lead to a solution where e.g. you go climbing a few days and you stay at a hotel with a nice spa for them.
That software buyer may only be interested in not losing their job, rather than the cost savings of the software. How do you show that person that you've done this at other companies to put them at ease? Can you see how useful understanding that prospects mentality could be?
Marketing is this kind of work at a larger scale. What it is people want to buy? How will you price it? Where will people find out about it and buy it? These fundamentals are hard to pin down and some practitioners are sleazy liars. Yet even without being an entrepreneur, just as an employee, you can try to answer those questions -- and that's marketing.
Learning more about these fields will let you spot good practitioners; working with them can be a boon to your career.
Let's take the bingo card thing and ignore Appointment Reminder: it makes good money, but seems to have some kind of upper bound in that he's never going to turn it into a multi-billion dollar business.
On the other hand, he's developed some serious competence in things like A/B testing, email marketing, and things like that, and is able to demonstrate their effects on companies' profits and thus command a percentage of those profits or at least get paid really well. So, by selling to companies that deal in the millions of dollars, it's almost mathematical that he's going to bring in more money than by fiddling around with niche products.
That's not to say he could have gotten to B without first going through A (sorry:-), as he gained those skills with the niche product.
I agree, if you choose to be a pure software programmer type then of course you can be just that. You can work in a core team or do research in academia. But if you have an entrepreneur itch you have to learn marketing and sales. In fact its pretty fun once you begin to realize that marketing also has lot of intellectual fun in it. A/B testing, human psychology, data analysis etc.
An example near and dear to my heart: consider an engineer, a marketer, and one of us weird chimeras all studying a graph of feature adoption among the userbase. The engineer things "Hmm, only 20% of the customers use X. That's unfortunate. Maybe they don't need it." The marketer thinks: "Maybe we should mention that in our newsletter." The chimera says: "All users who haven't Xed with receive a guide to why they want to do that automatically on the 4th day of the trial and it is also covered in the onboarding process. That's live in production as an A/B test. We'll know in two weeks whether it is a discoverability problem or a user need problem. Oh, that's actually a good point, maybe we should talk to the users about this. BRB guys I'm off to call five successful trial accounts who don't X and ask why."
I started development (age 10) coz - well - it was a computer! Getting it to do shit was fun. More than thirty years on I still find making the computer do shit is fun.
Along the way though I found I got a real buzz about seeing people use the stuff that I made the computer do. That was freaking cool.
So now I do both.
This involve being sure that I'm helping build something that folk will actually want to use (UX, Customer Development, Lean Startup, Lean UX, etc.), building stuff (UX & dev), and making sure that the people who will like using my stuff can find it and discover value there (UX and dev and marketing).
I don't acquire marketing skills because it's fun (although bits of it are - how could I not find the intersection of things like statistics, socal & cog psych, etc, etc. fascinating). I do it because I get a stupid amount of entertainment value from seeing people use and enjoy stuff that I help make - and I get a kick out of helping other folk achieve that too. And if you want that you need marketing skills (or need to work with people who do).
And I don't find it even the tiniest little bit depressing ;-)
When I started looking into advancing my career, though, I realized that I would just have to market myself to my prospective employers.
The self-sell vs. product-sell marketing skills overlap far more than not. Focusing one one leads to a lot more autonomy (and sometimes profit), though.