Mac vs PCI have been having a very interesting discussion with my technology team, and I was made aware of this article in Forbes written by Anthony Wing Kosner with the title “Stanford vs MIT: How Marketing Trumps Technology in Startups“… before you all start sending me flame mail, I am not saying Technology is not important just that Marketing trumps Technology and please read the article and read the argument below. Fred Wilson of AVC.com started a huge uproad when he took a swibe at Marketing here and he corrected himself by saying that his blog post was a bug. I think there is marketing and there is marketing… I believe Marketing is telling a story about your vision, value and why you believe anyone should use what you are making or envisioning. Seth Godin had a very response to the original post by Fred. Marketing != Advertising, lets think about this, when you are building a startup, it is an experiment until you figure out the Product to Market fit, and while you are doing that experiment you still need to tell your story. If you are not telling your story nobody really cares to ask you about your story. Sequencing marketing activities and team buildup is an important skill and IMHO an art i.e when do you scale the marketing team. I believe very strongly that while you are experimenting in figuring out the product to market fit you still need to spend resources ie. time, money, people in telling a story, it sounds extremely counter intuitive to Engineers, how can you tell a story about something you have not built yet… that is the visioning part of your startup. If you cannot envision the value, the problem, the solution and the experiments to find the market that you will serve, you are just pandering to the builder in you. In addition, even if the product you have built is great, without marketing there is no way to scale it to a point where it starts selling itself. This is a tough pill to swallow especially for Engineers and Technologist, who love the building part but don’t really care about the Marketing and Selling part. There is a point in time in your startup life you need to deal with this challenge. What I have found is that European/Scandinavian/Nordic Startups due to cultural reasons do not want to tell a story before they are sure that there is a story where as Startup in the US are much better at this. It is no magic that most successful startups come out from across the pond. I know I know hate me but the data does not lie.

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