That's just bad business advice. You need to market right from the start. Having a dedicated person to do it is actually more productive than the founders themselves doing it.

>> That's just bad business advice.

I'm no MBA or startup guru, but I don't often hear "Founders in very early stage/prototype stage should avoid interacting with their users". Early stage interaction is critical to the success of the product.

>> Having a dedicated person to do it is actually more productive than the founders themselves doing it

If the goal is to get to know their audience needs, and iterate the produce development quickly, then dev-to-dev feedback is absolutely critical. Now is probably not a good time to clog the feedback filter by adding another human to the mix.

You can spend 30 hours working on your product backlog of features that haven't been vetted, or you can spend 30 hours getting to know your audience and discover that NSCoreLibFoo gives people the most trouble with push notifications.

What would convert more: a homepage hero about the three new features you dreamed up OR the fact that PushLayer can fix everything that sucks about NSCoreLibFoo (which half of your audience hates with a passion as you discovered).

I did not say founders should not interact with users. What I said was that if possible, a marketing person should be assigned or brought it as soon as possible. Founders have to realize that they don't have to do everything. Letting others do for them is what helps a business grow.

If you haven't found product-market fit then what you need isn't marketing, it's product management and that's something that founders need to be heavily involved with at early stages.

Don't you think you need users to move towards product-market fit?

If you don't have product-market fit it's normally much easier to move the product than it is to move the market.

How do you know if you're in this situation or if you simply haven't been able to get the exposure you need?

It is not hard to get your product in front of, say, 1000 users. It is not difficult to attend a few meetups of iOS devs and ask them what they think.