Replying to myself, after 11h. There is a good number of replies, and they mostly underscore my point: I do not know how to deal with the problem and there is no defined way to go about it.
Most replies focus on "talking to your customers", validating your idea, etc. I know, you should talk to your customers. It's all good. I do. But this won't get you out of the tarpit. Talking to your customers mostly gets you new feature requests, so you end up building new features.
Also, once you have a business with a bunch of paying customers, the situation is different. You know the product can sell. If you can get 10 paying customers, you can also get 100, and probably 1000, too. That was what the original article was about.
There was precious little practical advice in the comments, apart from "content marketing" and guerilla marketing. One is something pretty much everybody does, and the other is difficult to pull out for B2B.
libertyEQ has a great point: we know so little about the whole subject that we even don't get the naming right. Sorry. For the moment I'll just keep calling all this stuff "marketing", until I understand it better.
My original point still stands: the article got it right, and the reason why we hackers build features instead of doing marketing is because marketing is hard, poorly defined, and there is so much fluff, myths and cliches around it. I'm still looking for a solution.
Most replies focus on "talking to your customers", validating your idea, etc. I know, you should talk to your customers. It's all good. I do. But this won't get you out of the tarpit. Talking to your customers mostly gets you new feature requests, so you end up building new features.
Also, once you have a business with a bunch of paying customers, the situation is different. You know the product can sell. If you can get 10 paying customers, you can also get 100, and probably 1000, too. That was what the original article was about.
There was precious little practical advice in the comments, apart from "content marketing" and guerilla marketing. One is something pretty much everybody does, and the other is difficult to pull out for B2B.
libertyEQ has a great point: we know so little about the whole subject that we even don't get the naming right. Sorry. For the moment I'll just keep calling all this stuff "marketing", until I understand it better.
My original point still stands: the article got it right, and the reason why we hackers build features instead of doing marketing is because marketing is hard, poorly defined, and there is so much fluff, myths and cliches around it. I'm still looking for a solution.