Netizen: Marketing Is Misunderstood

Thursday, April 30, 2026

Marketing Is Misunderstood

Marketing is misunderstood. The best Founders are most likely to misunderstand. The thinking is, if your product is super good, you don't need marketing, it sells itself. They think of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.

Steve Jobs? He was first and foremost a marketer. Wozniak was the product guy who built the actual machine. But the product guy had no vision. He saw a computer. He did not see a company. He built what he built and then took it to his boss at HP. Do you want it? Jobs was furious.

Musk? Mars has been marketing. Nobody thought of a better marketing campaign this past decade than Musk. All the media attention he got for talking up Mars. And he is not even going. He is going to Low Earth Orbit. Because that is where the money is. But Mars worked. It was amazing marketing.

Marketing was so important to Musk that he bought an entire platform for 44 billion dollars that kept bleeding money until he turned it into an AI company. Product and marketing are electricity and magnetism. They go together.

If you don't do marketing, you will not even know what to build. It need not be market research. It can be intuition. But that is still market research by other means.

The biggest myth in marketing is that marketing is broadcasting. You spam people. You show up in their DMs. You talk loud. You act flashy. The truth is marketing is listening. Marketing done well gives you the entire product roadmap. Because you are listening better than anyone else, you are beating everyone else. And that roadmap gives you valuation and raises big money. Vision is its own thing. It is a real product. It translates to actual dollars.

Somebody said product market fit decades ago. And people have been saying it ever since. Who said it? A product guy did. He wanted to shake the belief that the product is it. The product is not it it. The product without the market is the tree fell in the forest. Nobody was around. So the tree did not fall.

But the phrase product market fit does not capture it. It makes it sound like a zigsaw puzzle. You take your product to the card game, and put it on top and see if it fits. The market is not a static cardboard. In fact, it is so dynamic, the ultimate kaleidoscope, that you will spend the rest of your career watching it, and trying to figure it out. It is ever changing, ever morphing. The market is the goddess. You are a mere entrepreneur.

Market is a verb. Your product might be a noun, but the market is most definitely a verb. So say marketing if it helps. Don't say market. The noun needs the verb. The noun is nothing without the verb.

Marketing is propulsion. It brings in revenues. You do that and investors start chasing you. They don't understand you or your idea, least of all you (he thinks he is a genius!), or even your product, but that graph gets them. Marketing is adjacent spaces. Marketing is growth.

Any tech startup that has achieved product market fit and has raised some money, brought in some revenues, and is willing to respect marketing can hope to achieve unicorn status. Marketing unearths adjacent spaces. Adjacent spaces take you to unicorn status.

So to that phrase product market fit, I am adding another: Marketing Escape Velocity, that which takes you to unicorn status. Grab the book and read. (Marketing Escape Velocity: The Path To Unicorn Status And Beyond https://a.co/d/00r0S83j)

And another phrase: Grand Solara Vision.

The Columbus way worked 500 years ago. And even then it did not work. The Grand Solara Vision is the 21st century NASA or SpaceX mission to the moon. You need to know exactly where you are going, and how. You don't shoot for an hour, and then ask, do we turn left here?

The Grand Solara Vision has to be the very starting point. You don't accidentally reinvent an old industry, or invent a new one. You have to be intentional about it. That intention is the Grand Solara Vision.

Again, grab the book. Go read it.

Unicorn to Solara: A Journey of Imagination: From Billion-Dollar Startups to Trillion-Dollar Suns https://a.co/d/0f4a9zvz
Unicorn to Solara with Purpose: Marketing, Mergers, and Responsible Capitalism https://a.co/d/0285mAO0