Today I had a talk with a Hive Dev, he was pitching me on his projects. The projects went into technical things like the current Hive whitepapers, current tokenomics, and issues with the Hive inflation, he really seemed to understand what was going on with the blockchain issues and how he could do something about it. However, one thing that really came to a complete U turn, was when he touched the topic of marketing.
And the thought process is that is not only thing, this seems to be a very widely used mantra about how to approach software from a very technical view.
However reality is far from it, a lot of things have been built online, but very few have gained traction. Good projects and good products have never reach the mainstream and unlike many people thought process, the so called 'word of mouth' didn't helped them in the end to gain the necessary traffic to make the thing work.
This is precisely the moment to challenge developers directly: how much do you actually understand about digital marketing? It is a dangerous misconception to treat online marketing as a mere digital copy of offline tactics or to assume that traditional principles seamlessly apply to software ecosystems. Online marketing is a complex, data-driven domain requiring distinct operational frameworks, spanning advanced disciplines like predictive data science, game theory, machine learning, and algorithmic modeling alongside mainstream growth tactics, inbound funnels, and retention architectures.
The harsh reality is that far too many creators remain completely oblivious to these fundamentals, unwilling to dive into the technical depths required to acquire users—yet they still expect their projects to magically gain traction. Failing despite a well-executed strategy is one thing; failing because you refused to engage with user acquisition entirely is entirely avoidable. We are living in the age of artificial intelligence, where developers have zero excuses. You can instantly deploy specialized AI agents to automate your entire marketing pipeline, orchestrating multi-channel posting schedules, real-time engagement loops, and hyper-targeted messaging tailored to every distinct segment of your user base.
Hiding behind the tired excuse of relying solely on organic word-of-mouth is a recipe for absolute disaster. Claiming that you are too broke for real marketing and that your early adopters should serve as your entire promotional team is profoundly lazy logic—roughly as reckless as expecting your paying customers to act as your QA department and bug hunters. A single clunky onboarding experience or a bad first impression will burn through your prospective audience permanently. If you fail to capture attention immediately, your app will be dead in the water before you even have a chance to figure out what went wrong.
Another thing I discovered is that marketing can be more code friendly than what devs think. There are many coding techniques to implement a continuous improvement on users discoverability, usability and continuously returning to your app. How to shape your traffic in a way that they get targeted when you need it and in a way the user is motivated to keep using the tools. Learning not just on the bringing the user but making it easy to engage and invite other users are things that devs can capitalize and build it through code.
If you were in charge of a project, what will you do? Would you dedicate time to study how online marketing works? will you read on productization and effectiveness? Comment on this.
