Why Marketing is Important for Tech Startups

A Thought Leader article we liked from Elizabeth Yin:

Why marketing is eating the world

I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and grew up during the dot com boom in the late 1990s.

One of the most interesting things in looking back are the stark differences in what it took to be successful back then with a software company and what it takes to be successful in building a software startup today in the US.

When I was a teenager, if you wanted to get into internet startups, you needed to find information on how to build websites. Although there were some no-code website builders, they were largely terrible. Building websites from scratch was the way to go. Moreover, developer knowledge was not really available online, because content on the internet was still being written. You had to hop over to your local Barnes & Noble bookstore to buy books on HTML, Javascript, Perl and whatnot. Lastly and most importantly, you needed access to servers. It was not uncommon for internet companies to spend boatloads of money setting up their infrastructure in a closet at their office. Back then, technical knowledge was a really valuable and a limited skill. If you could assemble the best technical teams and keep them happy, that was a really strong moat for you because you could prevent other would-be competitors from being able to build a competing offer.

And as a result, for many years, there were not that many websites in the US market (or anywhere). If you had a website, it was relatively easy to capture attention and web traffic. One such website, Craigslist, a simple peer-to-peer marketplace site that we are all familiar with, was started in 1995 and continues to reign to this day despite so many upstarts trying to compete with it on better design and usability. Why? Craigslist gets the job done and more importantly, people know about its existence. Distribution is king.

Although it often took months to build out a website in the 90s, today you can often get a fairly straightforward site out the door even with no-code tools in less than a day. And if you do need to write code, you can search for code examples on just about every possible topic in a variety of discussion forums and on YouTube. Even more advanced computer science topics such as in machine learning now have so many open source resources and infrastructure. You can often use a variety of specialty libraries without having specialized knowledge. For the most part, in software, technical information has largely become commoditized. This isn’t to say that you can’t make good money being a software engineer — and in fact, if you are a top engineer, you can now...