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Comment by nihilocrat | Hacker News Reader

After reading Zed Shaw's post yesterday about how "Long Beards" are getting marginalized by "Product Guys" I cringe when I hear bullshit like this:

Ideas (and in most cases even the code itself) is worth little. It’s marketing that makes the startup.

(Mind you, ideas are worth little, but the rest... yeah)

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Don't take this the wrong way, but why did it take a Zed rant to see through this? Usually "department x is more important than anyone else" arguments are flawed to begin with.

You're right; it didn't take Zed to convince me, I just thought it was odd that I read two articles arguing about the same thing on vastly different ends of the spectrum.

When he says "ideas/technical expertise are worth nothing," I think it might be meant to drive people who are obsessed about ideas/technical implementation toward the middle where things are more balanced, more so than it is to drive them too far to the "marketing is everything" side.

I agree though, saying "X is >> important than Y" tends to not be a great plan.

Ideas (and in most cases even the code itself) is worth little. It’s marketing that makes the startup.

But it does have some truth to it.

You can write great code and still not get customers without _some_ good marketing. And on the opposite many mediocre products can thrive with great marketing.

Zed rants on a Zed blog IS his marketing. When the product is server code and the consumer is other programmers, Zed posting effort-rants to HN for programmers to read is GREAT marketing. If your startup's target audience isn't other web developers then the type of marketing will vary, but it is still essential.

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