Features vs marketing

Bootstrapped founders constantly argue what’s more important: better features or better marketing. I’d say neither. What then?

Ana Bibikova
3 min readJun 22, 2022
A courtesy of https://twitter.com/dagorenouf

I’d say, more important is a better product. But not in a sense you might expect it to be better — meaning, more advanced, sophisticated, with a better UX design or thought-through onboarding.

It just has to be more relevant to a specific group of people who have a specific problem and they are ready to solve it in a specific way. That’s it. This is my definition of better and I have gathered multiple proofs from my conversations with successful and failed founders (Read more on How to niche down your product offer).

A 1-minute quick guide on building a better product

When you’re in the ideation stage you have certain assumptions and hypotheses about your future customers. Embrace this as your a rule of thumb:

Test your assumptions and hypotheses before building anything

For example, you are planning to build a product that would create city guides on demand. What assumptions and beliefs this idea is built upon? You believe there are solo travelers who value authentic experience and struggle with…

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