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📖 The following is an excerpt from my work-in-progress book, Founding Marketing. It's a (very) rough draft of thoughts, notes, and research... so feel free to reply with your feedback on what I should expand more on and what needs to be clarified. Enjoy! Peldi Guilizzoni, the founder of Balsamiq, said: "If your product is remarkable, getting noticed is a lot easier." Having a great product isn't all that's required to grow. Customers aren't going to magically show up out of no where. (that's the "build it and they will come" fallacy) But you'll have a much easier time marketing a product that's truly exceptional. Bad products kill marketing. Great products amplify the effectiveness of marketing. You have to face the truth about your product because all marketing is derivative of the product. If your product isn't truly superior in some way for certain people, why should they switch to you? Then it's just a race to the bottom. You don't want to be a commodity. Let's get into it. Let's talk about how to build a product you can market. Now I'm not a product manager or engineer or designer so I'm not going to pretend like I'm an expert in this area. But I do know one thing. You can't polish a turd. Well you could try, but it would still be a turd. You have to have a great product. So that begs the question, what makes a great product? One way to think about it is on a matrix of how big the problem is and how frequently it occurs.
Products that solve bigger, more frequent problems are much more valuable than products that solve smaller or less frequent problems. That's just the truth of it. No matter how hard you try and no matter what kind marketing wizardry you pull, where your product lands on this matrix will determine how valuable it is, how quickly it spreads via word of mouth, and how successful your marketing will be with it. Where do you think your product lands on this graph? And if we take it one step further for specific features, imagine another matrix comparing differentiation and demand.
Sometimes what happens is that you start with really highly differentiated features but lack the fundamental features that customers need in order to actually use it. While no one likes to admit it, sometimes you just have to "check the boxes." You can talk all day long about what makes you unique and even how some of those features may not even be necessarily needed, but when the market speaks about what it needs, you listen. On the other side, you might start with a rather basic and undifferentiated product and then need to develop more innovative and differentiating features in order to persuade customers. More founders need to think about this graph and where their features land on this matrix. I'd encourage you to recreate this graph and chart all of your features to assess your feature mix. And along the way, you can develop some competitive advantages like…
It may not seem like much when you have just one or two competitive advantages, but the more you attain, it will have an exponential effect. Make it your goal to keep attaining more competitive advantages over time. —Corey
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Monday, June 9, 2025
📂 The ultimate marketing hack is building a remarkable product
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