Code is Not That Important, Marketing Is

Code is important, but unfortunately - I'm much more of a coder than a marketeer, in fact I have a pretty strong antipathy towards marketing - marketing wins out.

There are a few exceptions to that rule, but not enough to hope that your reincarnation of an IT business is going to be that exception.

Write good code, but please do not forget that if you want to turn a buck that you'll have to spend as much attention to the marketing of your product, if not more.

In the low-brow definition marketing is the set of all decisions regarding product, price, distribution and promotion. As soon as you start a company, you will do marketing. It's either bad or good or something in-between but it's marketing.

Promotion is something different. You can forget promotion, sometimes. Provide a working cure for AIDS or cancer and you need no (active) promotion.

But in today's crowded markets, the possibility of making a software that solves problems no one else addressed yet, is rather low. Then, promotion becomes as important as the product. They interact.

Promote your product badly and you'd be wasting money when you're making a good product. For in most cases, you don't need to make your software scale or easy to enhance, if just a few people know about it and use it.

Make a bad product (with no intend to improve it later) and you'd be wasting money when you're spending lots of it on promotion. For sooner or later, your customers will turn to your competitors and there will be no way to get back the money you spend on promotion.

In other words: All your marketing decisions, including how much money you spend on the product and promotion, affect your profit.

Where you want to go is a place where you are doing things people like in return for money. That means that you need to 1) find out what people want, 2) make that, and 3) tell enough people that some percentage of them will make this trade you have planned.

Coding is a part of #2. And because it deals with known environments and logic, it's the easiest of all of them.

Most great coders code because they love doing it, or love what they're making. Despite commercial contributions, open source projects thrive on this. When you're a company that sells software, you exist to sell more software. That's the purpose of marketing.

Good code is only useful to the extent that it makes it possible to continue marketing new features, and thereby increase sales. I think this is the reason for the distrust programmers have traditionally had for the people who sell what they make.

(1) Hiding low quality: Theoretically, this would be a point -- if and only if "quality" could be judged objectively. This is seldom the case: Just look at the design decisions different Open Source projects make and how many flame wars these decisions ignite.

Granted, sometimes code lacks objective quality. This is sometimes simply due to the ignorance of programmers -- for example, not salting a password in web applications.

However, most of the time, the lack of quality argument is simply due to people having different preferences! Making code is expensive; it takes quite a long time to build something that's useful and working.

In other words, there's a trade-off and people need to make decisions which goals are pursued, first. Any decision will result in disappointments. Sometimes, management needs to make decisions that emphasize different values then yours, usually the need to make revenue. But also consumers sometimes have different preferences: some would spend an available amount of development time on code security, others would spend it on usability, others on the amount of corner case functionality, others on something entirely different.

Even Open Source projects have problems, here. For example, a few years ago, GNOME developers were absolutely certain they could raise the quality of their product by implementing a spacial file manager. They were "highly motivated and eager to show the world how they think something should be done."

It was a disaster. Most users hated it instantly (strictly speaking, because there was no obvious and easy way to opt-out of it).

Here's the major mistake: Just because you're a developer with an idea, doesn't mean you have a clue what consumers want. In fact, that's the problem in most of these "low quality" arguments, especially when made by Open Source advocates: The software you refer as to, probably has no low quality; it just offers quality you don't recognize or need.

(2) Protecting consumers: This is just another form of the victim assumption many (left) politicians also like to use. You're assuming consumers are innocent and are being "fooled into purchasing" crap. Most of the time, consumers are not innocent. In fact, the most powerful sales arguments are those that build on the greed and selfishness on the consumer: How to make more money, get more sex, be more powerful. In fact, even one of the major sales arguments of Open Source is 'Make more money' (by spending less on license fees).

You can't sell crap to an informed consumer. But why are some consumers ignorant, then? Nobody stops them to educate themselves! You could say, the real reason is their laziness and unwillingness to learn. In other words: They are ignorant because they are greedy. And in fact, that's an argument also used quite a lot by opinionated (Open Source) developers. However, it just means people are selfish and rational on how they spend their time.

Your analogy to toasters is also flawed: There may be some exceptions, but in general making the "wrong" decision about software usually doesn't really hurt people -- in contrast to toasters.

(3) Ethical code: This is just a word many people like to use without due consideration, like "freedom". You probably seriously care about your code, but that doens't mean you're acting ethical. In fact, caring about your code just means you're selfish; for if there's a trade-off between the purity of your code and a feature request by your customers, you're probably going for the purity.

The more probable cause for your frustration is simply that other people don't share your point of view concerning things you care about. Sometimes that means you to do things you don't like. Sure, that's disappointing, but that's just how it is.

Neither marketing, nor market failures, nor Closed Source Software has something to do with it. These are just convenient rationalizations.

Early on? Marketing is the most important thing you need, since you need the users. You can get away with a crappy code since people are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Customer service is more or less useless too, since you don't really have any users to customer serve.

Mid-Stage? Coding is the most important. Best example is twitter. At this stage you are growing more or less organically, so you need to have great code in order to scale properly. You also need that good code to release more and more features to keep up with the competition.

Late-Stage? Customer service is the most important. At this stage your product is more or less polished, and you pretty much got as much market share as you can get. At this stage you need great customer service to keep the users you already got.

The UI might keep users interested once they're there, but it's not going to get them there in the first place.