We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30343040.

(There's nothing wrong with it, it just veered a bit offtopic.)

It's a cliche joke, but recreational drugs do not need advertising.

Because the culture so complicitly provides it, while at the same time outlawing it: movies, music and even the LE efforts: drugs busts and drug wars. All of that is a form of advertising.

In a sense it's the perfect advertising (by both being 'free' and 'covert'), supporting the perfect industry, perfect only in the sense of a feedback mechanism ostensibly designed to stamp it out, only ends up perpetuating its profitability, by squeezing the product between its free advertising and its illegality, inflating prices and profits.

I know this is a potential flamewar topic--I'm sorry. I tried to just state what I think about it here. If you downvote/flag I'll delete it...I don't want to start another flamewar.

Half the public ads in SF are weed delivery services. (The other half are trying to sell software to start-ups.)

It might not need advertising, but there are soooooo many sales reps working to push it, so....

No marketing, but sales.

The media does enough.

D.A.R.E did a pretty good job too.

I don’t remember a pretty nice chunk of the 80s thanks to their effective advertising. Also, now I am addicted to fried eggs.

Sales and marketing are different - there are TONNES of super successful products/businesses that lack salespeople - or who maybe have some, but the vast majority of revenue is “self serve” (ppl buying the product without talking to a salesperson).

I do agree that virtually every product needs marketing, and many need salespeople as well. But for plenty of products, salespeople don’t make sense - for example high volume, low price SaaS.

If your company is looking for funding for that low cost, high volume SaaS your CEO, CFO, founders…make no mistake…they are damn sure selling your high volume, low price SaaS.

My first customer was a friend. They told other people and it snowballed through word of mouth. I haven't spent any time or energy on marketing and have no salespeople.

Maybe minecraft :/

Notch constantly advertised his game on a popular imageboard and evaded bans for spamming. He did not credit Infiniminer as a copycat. Got super rich.

Fits the MS culture perfectly.

I am pretty sure they employ my 10 year old granddaughter…

Atlassian software

I am pretty sure the devil hisself markets this one.

Atlassian had a large reseller channel that sold its product into enterprise.

So it was third party selling instead of first party selling.

https://youtu.be/7SKUw3w2FEg

The unicorn face on my Apple Watch.

“Hi I’m thinking of upgrading my Apple Watch 1 but the 7 is quite expensive”

“Can I speak to your daughter for 30 seconds”

(Yes there’s a salesperson in the story but in my case there wasn’t and I know I’ll need another one of these things one day. For her.)

> product in this world that truly sells itself

Fiat currency.

Maybe people get it since “good” guys with big legal guns show up for it, and enslave or shoot you if you don’t come up with it, for your own good of course.

Ha. Touché

I believe that the Tesla Model S does. People were tripping over themselves to buy that thing with no marketing, for all its faults.

Elon Musk is the marketing

Fair point. But I'd think that a seven-passenger family sedan that out-accelerates every street-legal Ferrari ever sold, at the price of an entry-level Ferrari, would sell even with RMS as CEO.

Tailwind? They've built strong brand awareness through the quality of their OSS tailwindcss product who's been successful without any paid advertisements or sales people that I can see.

Similarly Ruby on Rails was great brand awareness for 37 Signal's Basecamp who AFAIK doesn't believe in advertising, and has made a point to pay for a "non Ad" against companies selling ads against their Basecamp trademark

https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016

DHH and Jason Fried are masters of marketing. Marketing != paid ads. They are great storytellers and have been doing it consistently for the past 20 years with blogs, books and podcasts. The story they built around their products also serves a culture and philosophy of people using their products, and telling other people about it.

In every big company I've worked for marketing is distinct from sales. Marketing is about lead generation, sales is about lead conversion.

If you want to sell into enterprise then you are going to need sales people and hence an expensive product that covers that cost. Those big deals need a lot of hand holding to go through.

There are plenty of counter examples though, where marketing is doing most of the work and the offering is mostly self service. Signing up for a $25/month Saas is never going to warrant a visit from a salesperson.

Of course sales is different from marketing. I was responding to the parent who said that Tailwind and Basecamp didn't do paid ads.

I dunno. I hear that a lot but whenever I'm working on a project with a client who uses Basecamp, it takes a good few seconds for me to remember that the URL I need to trigger autocomplete is "launchpad.37signals.com". Having your product name in the URL seems like Marketing 101 to me.

Trello. Word. Excel. Gmail.

Reformed salesperson here, you're 1 for 4, and Trello really should only get half a point because they've given up massive swathes of their addressable market to others (Wrike, Asana, Monday).

Word and Excel have the giant Microsoft sales team behind them. One of the largest technical enterprise sales forces in the world.

Gmail is similar. Google tried the "we'll build it, and they'll come" approach. It didn't work. Google has a long term channel based sales model, and a newer but rapidly growing direct enterprise sales team. They're constantly trying to get GApps in against the aforementioned behemoth MS team.

Gmail was the world leading email provider before any of the google custom domain stuff.

You’re confusing google for work or whatever it’s called now with Gmail.

Personally I don't count "giving it away" as the product selling itself. GSuite - Google Docs, GMail for Business, Google Drive, etc. - has had enterprise sales teams for a long time.

When gmail was included as the email client for their paid office subscription there definitely was salespeople involved, because I heard from them weekly trying to shill it to me. I’d argue that if you take a free product and want folks to pay for it, you obviously need salespeople as Google did.

> Reformed salesperson here, you're 1 for 4, and Trello really should only get half a point because they've given up massive swathes of their addressable market to others (Wrike, Asana, Monday).

Trello sold itself. Explosive growth. Great product. Whether they have given up market share is irrelevant.

Gmail had explosive growth. You use it, you're sold on how good it is.

I'm not sure why some of you think having a salesperson means a product doesn't sell itself. Everyone layers on sales to capture more of the market share at some point.

Doesn't matter if they have salespeople or not. It matters whether those salespeople can call up and have the other side already sold on the product. Because the product sells itself...

I'll submit Craigslist and Wikipedia as other options. Also Plenty of Fish.

Communities and knowledgebases can be built without salespeople.

> Word. Excel.

Microsoft absolutely has sales people for the B2B side of Microsoft Office constantly shilling Office 365. This absolutely doesn't sell itself.

And even ignoring the modern sales, it's arguable they were so good at sales in the 90s (when there were far more competitors) that they created the modern Office situation.

Once upon a time when it was Fog Creek, no, no, no…

I know for a fact on the last 3 just based on the # of cold call VMs I deleted back 10-12 years ago that I received every bloody week from Microsoft and Google trying to sell me their enterprise office subscriptions.

Product sells itself outside of enterprise though. I'm just saying that it is possible to have a product that sells itself, and reaches great success without having to have salespeople.

Maybe Word and Excel aren't the best examples, but I don't doubt they could have succeeded if they only gave it away to EDUs and had a base plan for consumers and a self-service enterprise plan. Microsoft had a foothold in desktop market so pushing Office and getting users to use it was easy. And once you try it, it does sell itself.

But I think Trello, Craigslist and Wikipedia are great product examples. You need not have a sales team to scale everything.

You can achieve that with a great product, great customer support, digital marketing and word of mouth.

I think you have definitely proved me wrong with Trello. Upon reflection I have been on that platform since perhaps day one of its release (I was reading Joel on Software blog posts usually same day back then). I know for sure since the first month (Sept 2011 Trello tells me that) and I am pretty sure I have had a paid plan for nearly a decade, probably dating back to late 2012 when I authorized Zapier to connect to my boards for automation.

> Tesla does not advertise or pay for endorsements. Instead, we use that money to make the product great.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1129924410339495937

What do you think a presentation by Elon of the latest models is?

What do you think putting a Tesla on a rocket and launching it towards Mars is?

What do you think PR pieces talking about the latest Tesla tech are?

Elon tweeting about Tesla is advertisement. It's not because it's not a pretty picture in a magazine page that it isn't.

not paid advertisements or endorsements as Elon says.

They don't advertise to consumers.

They have an enormous B2B sales team.

Sales reps are for B2B, not B2C.

Generally speaking, business to business customers expect a certain amount of investment from your company into integrating with them when they offer you a contract.

Sales is part of this.

"Sells itself" means the product able to stand on its own and raise awareness without paying for advertising to do it.

You of course need people to sign contracts & complete the purchase, that's irrelevant to how well the product is able to raise awareness without advertising, i.e. people interested in buying Tesla's didn't hear about it through any of their advertising.

I imagine Shannyn Sneed must sit around all day doing nothing then.

The only person I know that works for Tesla is Elon Musk, who's made a point to say they don't pay or advertising or endorsements https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1129924410339495937

Advertising is only a small part of marketing.