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 change, but the belief survives: that engineering and truth alone will win. Eighteen years later, the tools are different, but the blindness is the same. Algorithms can locate attention, but only humans can earn it. Almost half of all startups fail because they build something no one needs or understands. “No market need” is still the number one cause of failure. “Poor marketing” is not far behind. Most products don’t die from bad code. Great code can’t save a story no one understands. When growth stalls, founders chase new channels. When users don’t convert, they redesign the landing page. The pattern hasn’t changed in twenty years. I’ve seen the same scene play out a hundred times. A founder with a good product, confused by silence. They talk faster, add more features, post more updates. What they never do is stop to ask whether anyone understood them in the first place. You can’t fix direction with efficiency. Engineers describe what the product does. Customers only care what it means. Marketing is the translation between the two. That translation rarely happens because of how tech thinks. Engineers are trained to explain with precision, not empathy. They call that being logical. Rob Enderle once said that marketing runs on psychology, not thermodynamics. That still irritates engineers and still explains why so many product pages read like instruction manuals. Real marketing begins before the first feature is built. It starts with knowing who it’s for, what problem it solves, and why the story will matter in a crowded world. In 2007, marketing was the paint job. Today, it’s the growth hack. Both miss the point. Marketing tells you what to build in the first place. The pattern repeats in every generation. Dropbox, Slack, and Atlassian all started believing their products would sell themselves. They grew fast, plateaued, then hired CMOs and built brands. Tech keeps relearning the same lesson. The market won’t understand you until you learn to speak its language. The irony is that marketing knowledge has never been easier to find. Claude Hopkins tested headlines a century ago. David Ogilvy proved clarity beats cleverness. Philip Kotler turned empathy into a management discipline. Every principle we now call “growth” was documented long before the internet. The only thing that changes is the vocabulary. We upgraded the tools and downgraded the patience. Startups treat metrics as meaning. They chase click-through rates and call it progress. Goodhart’s Law describes it perfectly. When a measure becomes the target, it stops meaning anything. Dashboards light up while trust quietly erodes. The companies that get it right don’t separate product and marketing. Ecommerce teams test ideas the way engineers test code. They iterate until the message works. Most of tech still treats marketing as theater. One big launch, one bold ad, then silence. Marketing doesn’t end in applause. It ends in understanding. It’s how a company learns whether its message is landing or getting lost. The best teams listen at scale. The rest shout louder into the void. Consider Quibi. Two billion dollars spent and most people thought it was a food delivery app. Or Google Wave, where users couldn’t tell if it was chat or email. Innovation dies when no one can explain it. Slack entered later with a single sentence, “A messaging app for teams that kills email,” and built a billion-dollar category on clarity alone. Insight fades. Habits compound. Listen. Translate. Test. Every hour spent clarifying saves weeks of rework. Clarity saves more time than speed ever will. Marketing is how a company learns to speak truthfully about what it builds. It lives beyond taglines and tactics. It’s the bridge between what a team believes and what a customer understands. Apple sells creativity. Airbnb sells belonging. Canva sells confidence. Each of them built a product that worked and a language people could feel. Before great marketers write, they try to feel what the user feels. They ask what pain is real, what outcome feels valuable, and what words will make someone care. They move ideas from internal logic to human language. Every lasting product story follows the same path. It begins with pain, not potential. It builds trust before persuasion. It teaches before it sells. When done well, it makes the product feel inevitable. Positioning is empathy turned into direction. Messaging is clarity earned through focus. Distribution is trust built over time. These ideas existed long before algorithms. Tools help you move faster. People help you get it right. Trust is the only channel that compounds. Communities carry the message farther than campaigns. They remember how you made them feel long after they forget what you built. When you know your customer deeply, everything compounds. Feedback loops tighten. Decisions get faster. Honesty scales further than any ad spend. HubSpot proved it by teaching before selling. Airbnb’s “Belong Anywhere” added billions in valuation beyond its peers. Apple spends billions on marketing and earns it back in margin. Nike turned the three words “Just Do It” into a cultural reflex and tenfold revenue growth. The companies that endure build meaning into motion. Most founders never get there. They hire agencies, copy competitors, and test their way into noise. They want growth without grounding. Until a company understands its customer better than anyone else, marketing stays a set of experiments instead of a system of meaning. Understanding is the work. Everything else is amplification. Speed only matters when it moves in the right direction. The fastest way to waste time is to build something people don’t understand. The companies that last slow down long enough to listen. They treat marketing like product. They test language before features. They study how customers describe their problems and build from there. Tech still spends half as much on marketing as consumer goods firms. Ten cents of every dollar versus thirty. Yet startups that hire marketers early reach a million in revenue thirty percent faster. The math supports the craft. There’s nothing flashy about doing it right. It’s questions, rewrites, and uncomfortable truths. But it’s what separates teams that create momentum from those that only chase it. Peter Drucker said it simply. Business has two functions, innovation and marketing. Everything else is cost. If you want to learn faster, learn to explain better. Marketing is how you earn that clarity. It’s how the world learns to believe you.