I think you either need to split your time in between 100% product and 100% marketing or have a founding team that is able to do both - not just “marketing” but the ability to build and leverage a personal + corporate brand and get specific influential people to work with you on social media and for PR.

The “build in public” thing sort of works if your customer base is other aspirational founder-developers but also has saturated and become less useful. I think the stakes for what constitute a credible and trustworthy product are higher now that AI has lowered the bar for new entrants to get “something” working; in a way it’s almost discrediting now to market something not-quite-ready because randoms on reddit can just as easily do that, and it signals something very different now than it used to.

There’s also a bias towards noticing the noisy advertisers a lot and not how many other startups (some of which are quite large) mostly market through different channels or specialized buyers, and so assuming they don’t exist. HN doesn’t realize how many deeper tech companies there actually are because of that; generally IMO the bleeding edge SV technology companies are about 1-2y ahead of what you see as a product consumer/commentariat.