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You want to grow your startup? It's much easier when you Make Something People Want.

true, but marketing is not superseded completely by product quality and product/market fit. You also need to make people aware of your product and make a strong value proposition.

Exactly. I often think of the famous Ralph Waldo Emerson saying, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door."

And I think Ralph Waldo Emerson obviously never built any mousetraps and has no idea what he's talking about.

Nonetheless, the saying does seem to apply well if you replace "Mousetrap" with "Donut" and "World" with "Portland".

I know everyone may say these are outliers, but Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc all had ZERO marketing and acquired millions of users. Part of me thinks that alot of what people are saying about marketing applies to companies with a weak product or little differentiation. A monster, highly wanted product does appear to be the the exception

Google was the first actually-decent search engine - it allowed people to access the internet. All the others are social networks and largely rely on the network effect and being the one that becomes trendy, and thus aren't valid comparisons.

If you can spot and build the next Google then you may not need marketing, but those opportunities are rare.

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