For years, I believed that simply writing code, getting servers up and running, and keeping systems operational was the hardest job. While designing complex workflows in a manufacturing ERP, resolving PostgreSQL's WAL bloat issues, or protecting systems against DDoS attacks, I would always think, "This is it, the real challenge." Technical problems have their own unique, usually logical, solutions.
However, at a certain point in my career, when I started developing my own products and bringing them to people, this perspective shifted. Technical issues can be solved, optimized, and progress within defined rules. Marketing, on the other hand, is a completely different world – often unpredictable and impossible to fully control.
In this post, with my 20 years of field experience, I want to share the challenges of building and marketing a product from my own perspective. In my opinion, the difference in difficulty between these two areas is much deeper than we often realize and is frequently overlooked.
The Sweet Difficulty of Building a Product: Tangible Engineering Victories
Building a product from scratch has always been an engineering challenge for me. Managing Linux services with systemd units, adjusting cgroup limits, optimizing GIN index strategies in PostgreSQL, or ensuring idempotency in an API... These are tangible, hands-on problems, and with the right knowledge, their solutions are generally clear.
When designing real-time operator screens in a manufacturing firm's ERP or integrating AI-driven production planning algorithms, I knew that every problem I encountered had a solution. It might take me weeks, I might read documentation until the early hours of the morning, but eventually, that code would run, that system would come online, and users would use the product. The sense of accomplishment during this process was truly indescribable.
💡 The Nature of Technical Problems
Technical problems typically arise within a specific set of rules and logic. Error messages, log entries, or system metrics provide clues about where the problem lies and how to solve it. The solution often comes with knowledge and experience.
Developing financial calculators for my own side projects, integrating complex algorithms into a Vue or React frontend, or implementing native package integration with Flutter in my mobile app followed a similar process. I wrote code, tested it, debugged it, and eventually, something functional emerged. Even if I made a mistake, like a container being OOM-killed due to a sleep 360 command, I could understand why and fix it. It was a controllable loop.
The Invisible Wall of Marketing: Human Behavior and Uncertainty
This is where the real challenge begins. Even if you think you've built a perfect product, if no one knows about it or understands why they need to use it, that product has no value. I developed an Android spam blocker app; it was technically flawless, consumed minimal resources, and accurately detected spam calls. But after releasing it on the Play Store, it garnered only a handful of downloads. My months of effort were, in a way, wasted because it couldn't reach anyone.
Marketing doesn't have the logical flow of engineering. Capturing people's attention, making them feel a need, and explaining how your product meets that need is more akin to art than science. Understanding why an ad campaign you ran failed can be much harder than finding an SQL injection vulnerability. There are metrics, of course (CTR, conversion rate), but predicting the human behavior behind them is nearly impossible.
On many occasions, I've witnessed something I thought was a "great feature, it's bound to work!" receive absolutely no market interest. Or conversely, I've seen a detail I considered "meh" unexpectedly take off. This uncertainty requires a different mindset than the if-else logic I'm accustomed to in engineering. Marketing is the art of constant trial, error, and adaptation.
Trade-offs and Realities from My Perspective
In my opinion, the fundamental difference between building a product and marketing it lies in control and predictability. When building a product, you generally have control. With technical knowledge, experience, and the right tools, you can solve most problems. Issues like performance regressions, connection pool tuning, or VLAN tagging complexities can be isolated and fixed somehow.
However, in marketing, control is largely dependent on external factors: people and market dynamics. Like a BGP routing decision, your choices might be just one factor in the overall flow of the market. You can build a perfect ZTNA architecture, but if no one understands its benefits, or if your competitors pursue a much more aggressive strategy, your efforts might be in vain.
ℹ️ The Importance of Organizational Flow
As I've said in the context of enterprise software architecture, "software architecture is often not about software, but about organizational flow." This also applies to marketing. For a product to reach its target audience, for the right message to be delivered, for pricing to be set correctly – these matters require all units of a company (product, sales, marketing) to work in a synchronized organizational flow. Even if you have a technically perfect product, success won't come if this flow isn't smooth.
In my career, resolving a situation where voice packets were dropping due to incorrect DSCP marking with 3 different ISPs at a company's exit had a clearer solution than the marketing team's struggle to understand why a months-long campaign wasn't yielding the expected impact. The root cause of the technical problem could be found and fixed. In marketing, sometimes you just have to say, "that's part of it," and keep trying.
Conclusion: Which Difficulty Weighs Heavier?
The lesson I've learned from my 20 years of experience is this: if building a product is "difficult," marketing it is an "uncertain and exhausting" difficulty. Technical challenges can be brain-taxing but are usually rewarding because when you find the right solution, it works. The difficulty of marketing is more psychological; it doesn't guarantee returns on your effort and requires constant struggle.
Therefore, to everyone who has a product idea or is developing their own product, I say: no matter how proficient you are with technical details, without a proper marketing strategy, your brilliant ideas and lines of code are destined to remain confined to your own computer.
What do you think? In your own experiences, was building a product or marketing it a bigger challenge? I'd love for you to share in the comments.
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