mabinda.com Business, Education, Technology Commentary.

In the olden days, you could sell your product without even marketing. You just had to have a great product, and it would all sell by itself. But that’s not so these days. You just have to have an effective marketing strategy if you are to sell your product these days. It is said that not marketing your product is like winking at someone in the dark, they’ll never notice. Which is why, as much as you spend almost all your money in product development, try and at least have some budget for marketing, even if it’s just $100 per month. The good thing about online advertising is that you could advertise for as little as one dollar a day, and that could get you some traction. It is so bad that a great product doesn’t get traction simply because people don’t know about it.

With some brand influencers, they could charge as little as $20 for a mention, and so it’s up to you to decide whether you’ll use a brand influencer or the many online advertising networks. You could reduce some budget for product development and then bring it to the market and then use the revenues to gradually increase the quality of the product. I know it’s fashionable these days that almost all of the money to finance a startup comes from a venture capitalist, but I would rather that you use revenues to grow your business rather than just grow on VC money. Of course, a world changing idea such as Uber could attract VC funding even in the mature stage of the company, and that’s how founders shares are so much diluted that founders of companies usually get only a fraction of the ownership of a company. For instance, Jerry Yang cofounder of Yahoo only got 2 percent at the maturity of the company, while the seven founders of Indian software giant Infosys collectively only have 3 percent ownership.

A lot of big companies have tremendous advertising budgets. But if you apply disruptive innovation, that is form a company that targets the weaknesses or market gaps of incumbents, then you will be able to sell much more and then reinvest the profits back to the business. When you do market, it’s not a cover for a shoddy product, but just to let customers know that there is a great product that could solve your needs. It’s even harder if you are bringing something new to the market so you have to educate the market on what your product is really about, and that’s why many times, it’s the second or the third in the market that usually comes along and reaps the profits. Think of search engines for instance. Google was not the first search engine in the market, there was Yahoo and Alta Vista before it, but it’s google that was able to capture the market that it now controls about 90 percent of the search market, and only now is it coming under pressure from ChatGPT of OpenAI.