The worst advice solopreneurs keep sharing
The most common bad advice I hear in the indie hacker community is that product doesn't matter. All that matters is marketing.
I hear this advice all the time. And it's just outright silly and wrong as a blanket statement.
Some variations of the above theme:
- All you need is distribution and marketing to succeed. The quality of the product doesn't matter.
- If your MVP is more than a landing page you've launched too late.
- Validate your idea with a landing page, a waitlist, and $100 in Facebook ads.
- Don't waste months building a product. If you don't launch in a month. you've launched too late.
- A product can't market itself.
- Influencer X launched with a landing page and already made $30k in sales. That's all that's needed.
Typically it will go something like this:
I'm an engineer. I used to think all I needed to do was create a great product. But I wasted months building a product and nobody used it. Now I'm enlightened and realise the secret to success is all marketing.
There is some truth to this advice. Most advice you hear has some truth to it. But where people go wrong is when they give it as blanket advice.
It's true that distribution is important. You need to be more than an engineer to succeed as an entrepreneur. It's rare for a product to be so outstanding that it sells itself.
Another truth is to avoid over-engineering your products. You don't need Kubernetes to launch your MVP.
And don't spend two years building your product. Get it into peoples' hands as quickly as you can.
But where the advice goes wrong is taking it to an extreme to think product doesn't matter at all. It does.
If you launch a bad product no amount of marketing will save it. You might think you failed because your marketing wasn't good. When the reality is that your app was low quality because you only spent a week building it.
If everyone followed the "product doesn't matter" advice, most products you use wouldn't exist. If people took seriously the idea of having to find PMF within a month, 99.9% of startups wouldn't exist.
Just take a look at this chart from Lenny's Newsletter. Look how long it took these companies to find PMF:
These teams spent countless hours building and iterating till they found PMF.
Think of the products you use.
A few I use myself and you likely do too:
- Google Search
- Chat GPT
- Notion
- VS Code
- Figma
- YouTube
I wouldn't be using any if they didn't work well. None of them succeeded because of the marketing. They all succeeded because they were great products that solved real problems, and the marketing took care of itself.
There are 100 alternatives to Google Search, but Google won because they gave you the best results. It wasn't because the founders were influencers or put millions into marketing. If anything the competitors had larger budgets.
And it's not only VC backed companies this is true for. To create a $1m ARR SaaS as an solopreneur will be difficult unless your product is great and provides real value to users. From the outside it might look like it's all marketing, when the reality is that it's a great product that led to the success.
To bring another example. Someone recently told me that Notion made it because an influencer started talking about them on his channel.
But they got the cause and effect the wrong way round. The reason the influencer spoke about Notion is because it was such a great product. And the reason people listened is because they tried it themselves and it was great for them too.
It took years of building for the Notion founders to find PMF. They didn't win by launching a landing page and driving traffic to it with Facebook ads. You see the success at the end. You didn't see the years of grinding before you heard about the product. Which was likely five or more years after they started working on it.
The reason people continue to use a product is not because an influencer talks about it, but because the product provides real value.
Influencers talk about thousands of products. Every bit of marketing helps. But a few influencer videos won't sustain you long term. Solving real problems for users will.
Now there are products you can launch that require less effort. You can launch a community with a Discord server and a landing page. You can launch an agency with a landing page. I know agencies that don't even have that and do 8-figures in annual revenue.
I ran a 7-figure development freelance network myself. The only tech behind it was a landing page and no-code tools like Airtable, Notion, and Calendly.
But even there the core product was important, even though it involved no code. The product was providing great services to companies. And great freelance opportunities to developers. And the distribution was important too of course. I had to find the devs. I had to find the clients. (And neither of those happened via build in public. Mostly a lot of private conversations).
I'm sure you can find me more examples of people launching a product every month till one sticks. That is one route to success. Growing a big audience helps. Trying many times till you get "lucky" helps.
But there are far too many founders that fail because their product sucks. And any marketing they do won't fix that.
If you're asking yourself if you should spend more time on the product or marketing, it may well be you should be spending more time on the product. Great products sell and market themselves. Trying to market a useless product is a waste of time.
If you liked this article give me a follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/elie2222
I'm building Inbox Zero to help people manage their email inbox better with AI automation.
I'm constantly improving the product and doing what I can to market it too. But a killer product is what will ultimately determine Inbox Zero's long term success.
Very thought-provoking read, thank you for sharing. Reminds me of Jason Cohen's focus on the SLC (Simple Lovable Product) over the MVP:
https://longform.asmartbear.com/slc/
One of the reasons B2B SaaS MVPs are so notoriously terrible is that they're walled gardens. A pretty landing page gets people in the door, only for them to find a pile of unfinished junk behind the paywall that a developer wants to iterate on using their customer's money. Then everyone churns out and nobody recommends the site to their peers.
Nobody would buy if they'd seen the mess beforehand.
Looking at the list you shared, so many of these companies leveraged a freemium model or simply dropped users into a functional app that provided immediate value. I've found a lot of premonetization success in the form of organic traffic with https://bullionmarket.info/ simply because it's a good free tool for the niche (FinTech focused on precious metals investors). People share it and come back regularly. Marketing will be a multiple on top of an already valuable tool.
Contrast the walled garden business model vs. feature gating and it's clear to see which one will get you to PMF faster through iterating with your users.
Damn. That's accurate.
Right. I remember his graphic. Classic.
I don't think it necessarily matters if it's b2c or b2b. Products matters in both. But what the core of that product is will be different in both cases. There are also products that used to be good but would no longer win the market if they started today.
An app like WhatsApp is arguably not the best. But it's network effects will make it very hard to unseat. Same of companies like Salesforce. New startups pick Hubspot and other tools usually. But Salesforce not dying anytime soon.
Good products do market themselves.
They market themselves even better if they have an inherent viral loop for distribution.
And yes, good marketing is often wasted on bad products.
Yup for sure. We all tell our friends about great products. Very much agree.
Great post - lot of thoughts on small experiments while continuing to work towards a "perfect" product (no such thing of course). Think some of those pieces of advice are complimentary to that.
Well said. If you have an excellent product but poor marketing then it's not too difficult to focus on marketing for a bit and see benefits. However you can have the best marketing in the world, but if your product is garbage then no amount of improving the marketing is going to fix that.
For marketing you can more or less follow well established playbooks. Sure, this will vary depending on the product and the market, but marketing is a well-known quantity. So if you have a good product then you can crack open those marketing playbooks and focus on that for a while. If you have great marketing can you similarly crack open the product playbooks? No.
The product is where you're really solving a user's need, the thing that will actually get them to keep coming back to your product and pay for it. It's also where there's lots of unknowns and often no playbook to follow so it's hard. Imagining that marketing is going to solve everything allows people to indulge the fantasy that they'll be rich quick without putting in a lot of thought, the sweat equity of design, development, and iteration that leads to PMF.
Sometimes I see advice from a post that is a few years old where the author is insisting that marketing is everything. Sometimes I go and look them up to see where they are today. Occasionally they're still marketing marketing techniques, which feels a bit like a pyramid scheme where the capital is attention. More often they're back at a corporate job where the pay is steady and predictable because the marketing-only approach didn't sustain them.
Well said.
"which feels a bit like a pyramid scheme where the capital is attention"
Totally agreed! Without a good product, no amount of marketing can give us the results we are hoping for
Totally agree with this. I saw a lot of posts recommending doing marketing and pre-sales before building any product. What they failed to explain is that you still need a "product" — a prototype, an app with single feature, turn yourself into the product — to actually get anyone to pay for it. Unless your first customer is your mom of course.
Well you can get presales without a product. It happens. But you will need to craft a compelling story to get many sales. It often depends on the credentials of the person doing the selling as to how well the presale goes.
For example, if you're trying to sell a course on Twitter and have 200 Twitter followers and no track record in growing Twitter followings you likely won't make a sale. If you have 50k followers you'll make sales.
Same goes for SaaS products.
And sames goes for raising money TBH. Most people can't raise real money without a product. Unless they have great credentials. Vast majority of people need to build something first to convince people what they have is worth paying money (or investing) for.
To me, a compelling story is equivalent of a "product". A course creator with 50k followers and multiple courses launched under their belt still need a teaser (a social post, a video, some screenshots of course content, etc) to get pre-sales for their new course.
I haven't seen someone with credentials be able to make pre-sales with simply a tweet and a payment link. I'd like to be proven wrong.
Credentials != product.
"I haven't seen someone with credentials be able to make pre-sales with simply a tweet and a payment link. I'd like to be proven wrong." - pretty sure this happens a fair amount. The previous credentials of building stuff. But also not much difference between a tweet and tweet + landing page. They're both minimal effort relative to building out a full product.
Perfect! The true spot is finding the ideal ratio between an excellent product and successful marketing.
I think there is nuance. For builders who probably skew perfectionist, it’s a good bias to action. A practical lesson in “Good is the enemy of great”. That said, think it’s up to each founder to determine what level of substance is needed for their situation before cranking up the lead gen. Think some may need to build enough product out to know they’re capable of executing on the vision.
Fully agree. Bias to action is important. Whether that's dev or marketing.
If a founder wants to do lead gen/validation on day one, even pre-product that's great. That may be the most effective approach depending on the situation.
But it can be a mistake to give up when you don't get a response to that lead gen. People want a good product. You give them that and solve a real need and you'll be able to make your sales.
Totally agree with you! Finding the right mix of a killer product and savvy marketing is key for lasting success. Thanks a bunch for sharing your thoughts!
So true, thank you
I totally agree with you
Thanks for writing this. I think it's a good reminder, complete with examples.
Great marketing is (usually) needed to get people to try a product. The product needs to be great (and solve a genuine need/want) if you want people to keep using it, though. You're also unlikely to get anyone recommending your product if it's crap.
"But where the advice goes wrong is taking it to an extreme to think product doesn't matter at all. It does."
I totally agree! I've been fighting with this thought recently especially with getting my MVP off the ground! It can take time and more than a landing page is required!
Nice article really enjoyed it!
Side note: Big fan of Sprig! Saw it at the top of your list! Ryan and the team are doing a great job!
Thanks for the article mate
Which list? With Sprig. Where did you see that?
In the screenshot of the post top of the list
Well yeah, I even have that list of things that I think I implemented better than others.
And yet, the context of it is usually "please stop polishing your stuff, there is no end to any backlog, show what you got to people already". Maybe not to all people but every time I do the so-called hallway usability testing I get so much feedback I need a few weeks before another round
This kind of thinking, imo, leads to killing an idea before it even gets to be fleshed out. Sometimes as a business pivoting an idea leads to a better idea and then over time the actual product that makes money. Letting customers use the product (or lack of customers) will lead you finally figuring out the right path to take.
Exactly
Great article! Thanks that is something I needed to hear today. :)
I believe that achieving a balance between product development and marketing efforts is essential for success. While both are important, prioritizing the quality and functionality of the product is crucial.
I've observed instances where exceptional products have thrived with minimal marketing, particularly when they address significant pain points for consumers.
Conversely, there are cases where extensive marketing has driven initial success for mediocre products, but they ultimately struggle to maintain long-term viability.
Unfortunately I still belive this is a good advice :D
That product doesn't matter? Would love to see the bad solopreneur products making $100k MRR.
This makes $3m ARR and look at his GitHub stats. Same for every successful team I know.
I couldn't agree more! When we began Mokkup.ai, we realized the importance of striking a balance between product development and marketing. Rushing to launch can indeed lead to disappointment if the product lacks value. Like nobody's going to stick around, no matter how flashy your flyers are, if the party sucks, lol.
Also, such a well-written post. Good work! Thanks for sharing.
Absolutely, thank you!
Marketing is to me the only thing that matters.
I met people that sell without any tech, just because they have a personal brand.
Initally, I felt so jealous. But lets face it.
They win, our tech does not.
I think the next crack on the market is knowlegable developer with a strong personal branding.
Build a brand by all means. I started a YouTube channel. I have a Twitter following. I wrote this post to grow further.
A lot more you can do with a large audience. But it's a lot of work to build a following. Far more work than building a product for most people.
"I met people that sell without any tech, just because they have a personal brand."
I've met far more people without a brand and with a great product making great money. Both can work. But given the choice of one I'd choose product for sure.
Super curious about your youtube channel, how could I see it? 😇
https://youtube.com/elie2222 (it's for devs. about open source)