Yep, that's what marketing is (having studied several subjects in it as part of my business degree back in the 90s).

Marketing is not just a synonym for advertising and promotions, etc.

Marketing is about finding/building/reaching a market for a product. It involves both identifying/creating a market, and identifying/creating a product for that market.

Advertising/promotions is just a small (though expensive) part of it, but it's the part that the world sees, so laypeople can easily think that's all it is.

This is mind blowing to me if this is true. I didn’t take many business classes so I wasn’t exposed to this definition. I do run a startup and as others have eluded about startup tech CEOs I’m pretty bad at marketing. But saying that, I still can’t wrap my head around how a marketing person can identify a market or create a product for that market. I basically created the company cause I saw a need. It’s my job as CEO to make sure our company is laser focused on solving that need. Solving this need is basically our overall focus but I understand you are probably talking about marketing creating new markets within that scope. Our process of identifying and creating a product and market is all about meeting with potential customers and trying to solve their needs which is a combination of sales engineers and sales and tech leads being consultants and figuring out how our technology can solve their problem. I don’t see where marketing fits into this such that they could go out and create a new market and new product for us..i always thought marketing’s job was to help us better reach those markets, but I had no idea they could identify new markets and create products for those markets. Maybe we see are using different terminology.

I've heard marketing used with this definition. It's actually really common - most marketing textbooks and classes will start from the premise that the goal of marketing is to identify a market and better serve it, and then work forward from it.

That said - I don't think marketing is a good goal for a startup, for the reasons enumerated here [1]. Basically, you can visualize the roles in a company like this:

                Concrete   |   Abstract
   -----------------------------------------
   Tech      | Programming |  Architecture
   Customers |   Sales     |   Marketing
   Employees |  Managers   |     HR
  

And in a startup, you don't want anything to be abstract, because there's too much room for error just getting the concrete stuff right. Everything in the right-hand column belongs in a big company, with millions of users and thousands of employees, because they deal with emergent phenomena that happens when you're huge. If you're thinking in those terms you'll get crushed by the big companies that actually do have all those resources, so startups need to focus on small niches that can grow.

[1] https://genius.com/Jessica-livingston-why-startups-need-to-f...

There was a time my title was CTO, and I'd say to the devs, there is only one function in a company. Sales. Every minute you spend writing tests, is sales. Because at the end there is only one business model. More money in then money out. I'll frame it in a different fashion, often the issue is that developers believe that they are alone with in creating value. And that all of these sales and marketing clowns are just.... What you may probably come to understand is that.... you are a marketing person now! and that this does not make you a lesser person. Yes, you can still code. But your primary function had changed. And over a longer run... it will require you to gain new competencies. So how does a marketing person fit? simply. They are you.

Event "product market fit" feels like a sugar-coated way to say that no one is interested in purchasing your product.

I don't have a startup, but if I did I would view every single step in the process of creating one, both technical and non-technical, as an opportunity to test the market viability of your product.

I'm honestly surprised at the abundance of non-product-viability issues that were cited as determining factors. Maybe this reality is hard to face?

You can't even say that a product failed because nobody wanted it. All you can say is that nobody you asked was willing to pay what you were asking. I've seen plenty of promising products die because the company wants to only offer it as a service with ridiculous licensing requirements presumably out of fear that some customer is going to build a billion dollar business out of it and not give them a cut of the gross.

It has to be really frustrating for startup CEOs to fold and then see a bad copy of their idea appear as free software and explode in popularity.

  but if I did I would view every single step...

To a first approximation, everyone knows this and at least tells themselves it is what they are doing.

The real problem is that is hard. In the vast majority of cases, much harder than the tech & engineering you are doing.