by Ariella Brown
"If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door."
That adage is false.
In fact, you could even say that it's a trap.
If you believe it, you'll end up with a warehouse full of mouse traps but no revenue. To leverage your improvement into a source of income, you have to reach prove to them that your solution works better for people who are dealing with a mouse problem.
That's why you need good content that demonstrates an understanding of pain points and demonstrates how your product solves them. You also need to make sure to reach the people whose problems you will solve. There's not much point in marketing your offering to someone who has no need for it.
That's why you need to a marketing plan from day one. I wrote this on LinkedIn post earlier today, and this evening I came across Peter Thiel's expression of the same idea in Chapter 11 (p. 127) of Zero to One:
In Silicon Valley, nerds are skeptical of advertising, marketing, and sale because they seem superficial and irrational. But advertising matters because it works. ... You may think that you're an exception; that your preferences are authentic, and advertising only works on other people. .... But advertising doesn't exist to make you buy a product right away; it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later. Anyone who can't acknowledge its likely effect on himself is double deceived."
Thiel ads this observation on p. 130: "If you've invented something new but you haven't invented an effective way to sell it, you have a a bad business -- no matter how good the product."
In case you read the title as a reference to being alone, I have another blog on working alone that goes in a different direction.
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