What surprised me wasn’t that PR matters, but that shipping a finished product seems to carry almost no signal by itself anymore.
At that point it stops being about communication skill and starts feeling like a separate coordination layer entirely.
Do you think that’s just how things evolved, or did shipping simply stop being news at some point?
People have a hard time understanding the intensity of indifference that people have to any kind of marketing (especially a lack of marketing!)
Back when I was the PR director for a college radio station I fully expected to use a whole ream (500 sheets) of paper to cover a campus that had 2000 students and have at least 10 different poster designs if I wanted to get people to show up for a dance back when we had a reputation that "nobody shows up at KTEK dances" -- that's what it takes to break through.
I'd be loathe to delegate that kind of work to a student these days because most of them lack the hustle. They'd think putting up 15 copies of one design is enough because of course everybody is so desperate to see your message... NOT!
If
What I’m struggling with is less the idea that hustle is required and more the scale of it.
When even a finished product requires a ream of paper, 10 variants, repeated exposure, coordination, timing — it starts to feel like the signal isn’t “this exists” but “this has already broken through elsewhere.”
At that point, shipping feels necessary but almost irrelevant without an external amplifier.
Do you think that indifference has increased, or that the cost of breaking through has just grown beyond what individual builders can realistically do alone?
no product is ever finished…
I meant “finished enough to be used,” not “done forever.” The question is whether even that threshold still matters.