What if spending money on marketing had made you grow twice larger? Twice faster?
When people say "I didn't spend money on marketing", the only translation is "I knowingly overlooked massive growth opportunities."
I think a more useful way to think about it is "Know your users, and your channel." There are some user populations - and developers are usually one of them - that are virulently anti-advertising. Any paid channel usually earns instant distrust from them. Putting money into marketing spending can have a negative ROI for them, because it has a signaling effect on the brand that says "Our product quality isn't good enough for us to get users without paying for them."
Then there are other user populations - most e-commerce is like this - where there is no such signaling effect, and they are happy to check out new products, regardless of how they hear about the product. For these markets, it's silly to ignore paid channels; you're just leaving money on the table.
When ad campaigns are run, they usually work by targeting programmers' bosses, encouraging the organization to purchase & standardize on one solution and then forcing developers to adopt it via management fiat. That's the route taken by Java, MongoDB, Oracle, .NET, many of the companies in the Hadoop ecosystem, etc. It certainly works - these are big companies - but it requires a consultative enterprise sales team that can work to get the solution deployed across the whole enterprise. The author obviously doesn't have the resources for that.
The middle ground, where you provide a developer tool with $100-200/year CLTV and hope to get it distributed via paid advertising, is a very difficult place to occupy. That's the area occupied by FogBugz and RethinkDB and Sandstorm and many analytics providers. Most of them go the community-building route, and it's still very difficult. Only company I can think of that's thrived here is GitHub, and they went the word-of-mouth, community-building route first. Companies like Jetbrains, Atlassian, Rational, etc. thrive as well, but they've got large enterprise sales teams that standardize a whole organization on their products.
The point is that developers don't just buy software. They're marketed stuff constantly, like everybody else. To suggest they're immune to it seems a little naive to me.
Same reason a good mattress is worth $1k+.
You spend a lot of time in it, and quality product greatly increases your quality of life (back pain etc).
Note: I have no idea if Aeron chairs are good or not.
I first found out about ipinfo from a Google search looking to solve this problem. Haven't pulled the trigger on using it, but it's been on the back of my mind for awhile now.
For me, their marketing happened to be their placement on Google. I don't really know how you'd pursue paid channels on this one (outside of SEM and SEO).
It's a solution to a known problem. Unlike, say, the Apple Watch which has to first convince you have a problem... (This coming from a guy who's very interested in buying a watch as I train for a marathon.)
> I built the API in a few hours, posted the answer, and forgot about it — until a few months later I got an email saying my server usage was off the charts. I’d been getting millions of requests per day.
that they basically just set it up as a side-project and answered a couple questions on SO about it only to be confronted with its explosive growth after a few months.
One could then interpret the author in that situation as thinking "don't need marketing, who's gonna use this little thing I made anyway. [a couple months later] Oh shit, this blew up and I didn't even need to spend anything on marketing it besides plugging it on Stackoverflow occasionally".
Someone searching for "IP API" on StackOverflow and having his site rank in the top result(s) is the same as searching for "dresses" on Google, but without having to pay for search placement and getting 100% targeted traffic.
If the headline simply reads "Taking $foo to 250M API req/day" and then it turns out that all of the traffic came from a $4MM ad spend, it's a lot less interesting to those without $4MM to spend.
We saw a 500,000% gain in sales by marketing, but to be fair we were small and had no idea what we were doing.
I was as skeptical as they come, but a good marketing team basically launched us from nobodies into LEO. Yeah we had a great core product but still... gotta know how to sell it.
I'd compare it to having a kid. If you have money you can probably buy your kid into a good school and hook them up with a good job when they graduate. Or you can set them up with the right foundation and watch them succeed on their own.
I did the same as the OP with a project of mine. I never spent a penny on ads and it's grown into a very popular charting/trading tool among cryptocurrency traders. I also take pride in the fact that I grew it organically.
What's puzzling is that you would deprive yourself from making your great product known to more people simply because you want to do it the "hard way."
Forgive me, but I'd call it "the dumb way."
Also, it leads to added risk to building something people don't want and only engaged because of the marketing drowned out finding what they really wanted.
That's not the only translation. Another one is "I knowingly avoided pouring lots of money down the drain."
After all, just because you spend money on marketing doesn't mean you will see any returns.
being successful without marketing probably means you were successful due to word of mouth. Its hard to be successful due to word of mouth when your product sucks.