Great products don’t market themselves

At a recent board meeting, someone suggested that we needed to go hard on PR and marketing to “build hype.” When the phrase “build hype” came up, the rest of the room soured immediately. To many, hype was synonymous with snake oil. The company in question is doing legitimately impressive technical work, work that will define the category it is in, and almost no one outside its immediate customer base knows about it. Later that meeting, I asked the founder: Had anyone, anywhere...