Product Marketing for Engineers

About the three problems, I agree about the first two; debt definitely has impact, but I'm not sure how big and in what forms. You're probably right, though. I'll need to think more about it. For instance, there's definitely debt-based pressure on the low-wealth end of society, which makes people work on things they otherwise wouldn't. But what about the high end, the decisionmakers? Do they face similar debt-driven pressure?

Here's what I think a half-overhaul towards pull-based economy would look like. At a minimum, no advertising in push form whatsoever. That means no ads on the web, no ads in newspapers (on-line or print), TV, no product placement, no leaflets, no billboards. No ads of any kind where you'd encounter them by accident. Product discovery would be focused on company sites, on-line catalogs, mail-order catalogs, on-line product/service search engines, trade shows, and other outlets which were labeled up-front as product discovery. The goal here is that an ordinary person should have full control over whether and when they get exposed to advertising, and secondarily, to make it customer-driven. Make it easy for the person with needs to find solutions to these needs, evaluate different options based on trustworthy information[0], and pick one that works best for them.

That's more-less the idea I have on this topic. It's incomplete, probably a bit incoherent, and definitely not optimal for hundreds of reasons. I expect it to be torn apart, and I'll be thankful for criticism - I can't develop it further without feedback :).

As for how to make any of this happen for yourself, today? I'd start with the obvious - aggressive ad-blocking, avoiding exposing yourself to anything that smells of content marketing, getting rid of your TV service (the hardware itself can still work well for playing games on a console). Never doing product discovery on an e-commerce site. Asking trustworthy friends for recommendations of products and services, and giving recommendations if asked, qualifying your level of certainty and disclosing any conflict of interest. Being proactive about searching for things you need on-line. Perhaps subscribing to an industry magazine, but bearing in mind that it's - to quote Paul Graham, "a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it look like a magazine"[1], and otherwise not trusting it further than you can throw it. Inflicting social pressure on people who decide to monetize their friends and family, if you know any (MLMs, influencers). Also, learning to respect your money and not spend it on an impulse - to counter the long-term influence of advertising. Make each purchase a conscious one.

That's more-less what I do. I barely see any overt ads on-line these days. Can't avoid covert ads, can't avoid meatspace ads either, but I can make damn sure that if I feel sudden desire for a particular product or product category, I'll pause and spend some time researching it independently before making a decision. The goal here isn't to stop buying things, but to maximize the utility and happiness you buy per dollar spent.

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[0] - Efficient market requires minimizing information asymmetry. To the extent advertising is spreading disinformation, it's making the market less efficient.

[1] - http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

By coincidence, the same author has wrote an article about that very recently: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/. In particular, see section II.

I'm still processing the article in my head, but as I understood it: it's important that all cells in your body share the same genome. For some reason, evolution in multicellular organisms can be seen as two-tier - competition between the cells, and competition between collections of cells (organism). The higher-level competition forces the individual cells to behave in fully-cooperative way; those organisms that can't enforce order within get cancer and die prematurely.

The mechanics of it seem sound, and it's a nice model for a lot of things, natural and otherwise, but I'm still confused about how such two-tiered evolution could've arisen in nature wrt. multi-cellular structures.

That's actually extremely helpful. Thank you!

As someone who has turned side-projects into acquired products and companies, your primary focus should be learning as much as possible and being as humble as possible (to facilitate the learning process). Chances are overwhelming that your current product "sucks" so to speak, but you should remain confident that you can likely get from "it sucks" to "it's actually pretty useful" fairly quickly by getting it in front of people and letting users use it.

Stay humble, get it out there, focus on learning, and good luck!

It’s a skill you can train just like any other.

We all sucked at programming in the beginning too! Just keep at it and your marketing chops will improve.