Why Tech Still Doesn’t Understand Marketing

Hiten Shah argues that tech has long misunderstood marketing, treating it as decoration or a growth hack when it is really the translation between what a product does and what it means to customers. He notes that the belief that great products sell themselves recurs across generations, while many startups fail from building things no one needs or understands. He contends that marketing starts before a product is built, shaping positioning, messaging, and distribution through empathy and trust. The essay matters because it reframes marketing as a discipline that informs what to build, not just how to promote it.

01Key takeaways

• Treat marketing as the translation between what your product does and what customers care about.
• Start positioning with customer pain and real outcomes before you build the feature set.
• Watch whether metrics still reflect trust, since optimizing a proxy can quietly erode what matters.
• Test messaging and language with customers before expanding features or launching big campaigns.
• Build trust through teaching and community, because it compounds more reliably than campaign spend.
• Invest in clarity early, since hours spent sharpening the story save weeks of rework later.

02Key sections

The myth that products sell themselves

The essay traces the belief that great products need no marketing back to the 1950s and notes its persistence in Bay Area tech. It frames marketing as dismissed even as startups keep failing for lack of understanding.

Marketing as translation

Engineers describe what a product does while customers care what it means, and marketing bridges that gap. Shah argues that real marketing begins before the first feature is built.

Metrics that mislead

Startups chase click-through rates and dashboard numbers, which Goodhart's Law shows can stop measuring anything meaningful. Trust can erode while the metrics look healthy.

Positioning, messaging, and distribution

Shah defines positioning as empathy turned into direction, messaging as focused clarity, and distribution as trust built over time. Examples like Slack's single sentence and Nike's slogan illustrate clarity compounding.

Understanding before amplification

The companies that last slow down to listen, test language before features, and treat marketing like product. Shah closes by linking clarity to learning faster and to Drucker's view of marketing as a core business function.

03From the post

“When I moved to the Bay Area in 2007, everyone wanted to go viral. Growth was the dream. Marketing was decoration. People believed great products sold themselves. That idea wasn’t new. HP’s founders said the same in the 1950s. They thought marketing was what you did when your product wasn’t good enough. Edwin Land repeated it decades later. The names…”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.