>As long as your product is good enough, no one needs a marketing budget or to measure if marketing is working.

Let's say you make an incredible mousetrap, better than any before. Then you tell some people about it, they buy it, and stop thinking about it because it isn't central to their existence.

You've now saturated your market and have no ability to expand easily without putting effort into marketing or advertising. How do you go from there to 10 million units sold without a marketing budget of any kind?

What about if the package is extremely off-putting to people outside your culture or if the language on it is confusing. How do you know without measuring?

Yeah, it's hard to detect when a large number of people within this community actually believe what you're being sarcastic about.

I used to think that way. My customers liked my products, but I didn't really get many new customers. I doubled down on improving the technology. Then I ran out of money.

"If you build it, they will come" is only very rarely true, and chances are there was some kind of submarine marketing going on anyway that you just didn't know about.

I wonder what makes nerds like us end up with that opinion.

Surely anyone that reaches adulthood ought to know that selling yourself well and having some damn good looks will bring your farther than just being the real deal?

It takes some huge lack of awareness of one's surrounding not to notice it

It's because we constantly spend time/effort on finding better solutions to things, but most people don't.

Are you being facetious?

Everyone has the time to roll out their own analytics? Where do you work, Google?

While developing your own analytics seems like overkill, you definitely can host your own analytics, using one of the many solutions where all the analytics data are kept on your own servers.

I see even HN needs '/s' .

You'd think stating that marketing doesn't matter and everyone has time to develop analytics would trigger some sarcasm detection somewhere

There are others in the thread repeating that sentiment in a much more serious tone, that’s why I had to ask.

You do realize that SEO to rank in search results and posting on social media (or hacker news) about your product is marketing? Without marketing how do people find your product?