(2024-09-15) Taylor What Do You Mean By Marketing

Dorian Taylor: What Do You Mean By “Marketing”? A friend ambushes me with a paper that causes me to adjust my mental dictionary with respect to what certain business-critical words mean.

Peter Drucker (in)famously wrote that all salient business activity reduces to two categories: marketing and innovation.

my instinct is to map his marketing-innovation dichotomy onto a different one by Herbert Simon, which is about the analysis and design of systems, and what he calls outer and inner environments:

  • Marketing for outer (the boundary/interface of a system),
  • Innovation for inner (all its parts and pieces and the ways they are connected together).

In my experience, engineering is what I would call “net inward-looking”

That all said, I think my ontology in this area is due for another update. The other evening, Venkatesh Rao forwarded me a (presumably classic) whitepaper by a guy named Ralph Grabowski called Who Is Going To Buy The Darn Thing? It argues that engineering-centric firms should spend at least the same amount of money on marketing as they do engineering, and ideally many times more.

I found this paper compelling enough to write about because of what he means by “marketing”.

successful companies (the examples are several decades old, hence “classic”) all have very high ratios (he seems to be a fan of around 4x)

Per Grabowski, marketing is a distinct activity from promoting (which I infer to be a superordinate of advertising, PR, etc.) and selling, which is self-explanatory.

giving us something that looks a heck of a lot like what we nowadays call product management,

…but how does somebody like me (bootstrapping) implement this plan? I don't have any capital to speak of, and it's just me. What I do have is my labour—or more accurately, my attention—and there's still a lot of work to be done. So one thing I can do for now is denominate the budget in hours

Another issue is that my product—to the extent that you can call Intertwingler a product—is a piece of infrastructure, so its “market” is people looking to make media artifacts (read: websites) and applications on top of it. It's also open-source, so nobody's paying money for it.

To monetize Intertwingler, then, I have to be its first customer. This was always expected. The question is, what do I make on top of it? Here is where investing in marketing (qua Grabowski) can help.

Venkat insists I'm a “product guy”, which might ultimately be accurate, but I'm going to have to continue to cosplay as a “services guy” until I have enough product income to uh, “retire” from it.

He told me that he never risks a dime on a new venture that he hasn't already sold. In other words, he had customers before he even had the (more of a design fiction prop than a) prototype.

Hold on…
…I have not one, but two products that already have customers:

  • the Nature of Software
  • the still-unnamed IBIS-derived planning tool

you have to transform the complex snarl of information in a way that adds order, without destroying the structure that's already there.

I have a whole rant about why spreadsheets are inadequate. TL;DR: too flat, too ambiguous, too [a few other things].

When trying to understand a thing, it is particularly valuable to be able to examine different representations of the same information

This is the essential function of Intertwingler: it takes an arbitrary data structure and turns it into a navigable—and editable—website.


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