Artasaka
Design
Development
I love listening to people complain that their product or SaaS didn’t get any attention.
It’s usually those who spent weeks, maybe even months obsessing over every little feature, tweaked the UI to perfection, making sure to have every error in the backend handled. They were convinced once people saw it, they’d be blown away. So they make it, launch it, and hope for the best. Maybe they even posted on Twitter once or twice and told their friends about it.
Then they waited and…
Crickets.
Yeah, they built something real and valuable, but they forgot a major part at the start: find someone who cares.
Here is the thing, nobody really cares what you build, unless you already have an audience or a waiting list longer than a Black Friday queue. Launching a product without doing any marketing for it, it’s like whispering into a void, when you should be yelling.
You have to give people a reason to care about your product, and it’s not what tech stack you used, how many hours of sleep you lost on it, or how many white monsters you drank while developing the whole thing (nice tho). It’s all about the problem you solve with your product, and how clearly you show that to the world.
I have been victim of this too once. I thought the product came first. That once I built something awesome, the users would come. But building first and hoping someone bites? That’s not a strategy. That’s a prayer.
What I should’ve done was start the conversation before I ever opened Figma. Talk to the people I wanted to help. Post thoughts, mockups, questions. Start building trust. Even a “Hey, would this be useful to you?” message goes a long way.
I used to think it was scary to talk about an idea before it was ready. Now I know what’s scarier: spending months building something no one cares about.
So, which comes first? Marketing or the MVP?
The answer is… Neither. They come together.
Marketing and MVP aren’t a chicken-or-egg thing. They’re a dance. One doesn’t work without the other.
If you market with nothing to show, people forget you exist before you can prove you’re real.
But if you build without testing interest, you risk solving problems nobody asked to be solved.
You don’t need a polished product, but you do need something. A mockup. A rough prototype, a duct-taped demo, something people can poke at.
Marketing works best when there’s a tiny fire already burning. The MVP is the match - marketing is the oxygen.
And if you’re worried about marketing something before it’s even made. Just don’t. Have you never heard of people reserving a kindergarten spot for their child that hasn’t even been born yet? Marketing before building isn’t cheating, it’s smart. It means you value your time, your energy, and the people you’re building for.
And when you do launch, you won’t be whispering. You’ll be showing up to a crowd that’s already listening.
If you're struggling with either though, come talk about it in Oddsbreak.
