Knowing your product too well is not necessarily an asset when it comes to marketing, especially if you created it yourself. There is often a tendency to overvalue features which were difficult to code rather than features which add real value. Knowing your consumers is far more important.
The first problem is that the product should be suggested by the users, not thought up by the developers. If the users tell you what they need, they are more likely to buy it. This is called market-driven product development.
The second thing to keep in mind is that you will probably think your product is about three times as valuable as your competitor thinks your product is. And your customer will think your product is about a third as special as your competitor thinks your product is. So basically, your customer thinks your product is about one ninth as special and beautifully different as you do.
In my humble opinion, these are the mistakes the author made, not the ones he discussed in his piece.
There's an argument to be made (not necessarily by me) that if you have to spend a lot of time communicating your value proposition to your market, there may be something wrong with your product. The value proposition of your product should be self-evident.
This goes for many many things. Most products are produced and marketed for the general consumer. It‘s time-consuming and frustrating to sort through all that marketing crap when you‘re looking for a new device/product/part when you know what you want.
A sad fact of life is that sales and marketing are what distinguish successful products from flops. Regardless of the quality of your product, if users don't know your product exists, understand how it can solve their problem and have a efficient mechanism to adopt it, your product will die.
Product and marketing problems are often very closely related, especially when the product depends on users actually using it. For example, what makes Hacker News special isn't the software, it's the users. Same goes for Reddit, Twitter, and lots of other sites.
"When a lot of people think of marketing or sales they think of tricks that fool people into buying something. But great marketing doesn’t do that. Great marketing comes from understanding exactly what the customer needs on an emotional level, and showing how your product will satisfy those needs."
This is so true. The difference between knowing your product and not knowing your product is knowing why someone needs to have it. That is why the question "Why would anyone buy this?" is so revealing. It is also why so many startups blow it.
I asked an engineer who was talking to me about their product that question and he said, "Why not? Its free!" I pointed out that going over to the side of the road and picking up rocks is also "free" but people don't do that everyday. Certainly not so often that municipalities feel a need to secure their landscaping from theft.
A critical part of product development (making a thing) and marketing (sharing a thing) is understanding your audience/market, both so that (1) you have a target for what to build and so (2) you can reach them/they can find you. This is why "personas" exist, which are reasonable guesses at first but are refined as you find product/market fit. Things made for "everybody" almost always turn out to be not interesting enough for anybody.
Be careful. I've seen lots of ads that try to convince me how valuable a certain product is; but the ad itself doesn't answer the "who, what, where, when, why, and how" that I need to know. So:
1: Make sure it's 100% clear what your product does (and doesn't) do.
2: Make sure that it's super-easy for me to find out high-level specifications. (For example, if you're selling a computer, it needs to be super-easy to find out what ports it has.)
I think saying that customers tend to prefer "simple done well" is an oversimplification (pun unintended, but kept anyway). I've found the real issue is that people have a maximum rate of information absorption and when a salesperson starts rattling off a list of features, that rate is quickly surpassed. If you could make a potential customer in a shoe store understand that the rubber compound in a particular shoe would make it perform 30% better, it would likely have an impact on the sale. The problem is that it is nearly impossible to make someone quickly understand something outside of their frame-of-reference. Most people will just start ignoring you as soon as you say "rubber compound."
I think this post is a more valid commentary on how products should be sold than how products should be made. For example, I used to sell a fairly complex piece of engineering software. I found that the most effective way to demo the software was to find out about one of the customers problems and show the software solving that problem over and over. Often I would only end up showing 2 or 3 features of a program that had thousands. That doesn't mean that the customer wouldn't go on to find value in many other parts of our product once they started using it, it just means that in the context of a sales meeting, making one point well is often as good as you can do.
Make a great product. Know your audience. If they try it and don't use it then the product is bad. You don't have a marketing problem. You have a product problem.
It's not hard to recognize when you have a good product when it's feature complete and selling like hotcakes. Recognizing that you have the core of a good product with potential to be great if you slog it out and stick to your vision is hard. Really hard.
It's also important that you present the product in a way that allows the customers to see its value to them. The analogy i hear most often (though I forget its provenance,) is that you're better off selling dinner than dead chickens.
That said, prior to product market fit, it can be difficult to know whether the problem is that you haven't found the correct market, or that There is no market for what you're selling.
Eh, it’s not necessarily clear that nobody needs what you’ll end up with after iteration. Or maybe people need what you sell, but your marketing is unclear.
That's the build-it-and-they-will-come mentality! (It almost never works too!)
Great marketing is as important (possibly moreso) than a great product. It's probably easier to make a mediocre product a success with great marketing than to make a great product a success with ho-hum marketing. There's no point in having a great product that nobody knows about or worse, cares about.
Product development is like eating out: if you can't afford the marketing, you can't afford the product development. Paying for one and not the other is a great way to throw away the investment. It's just such a rookie mistake and completely unavoidable.
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