"Yes, you're going to do those things, but since millions of other people are doing that too, you're still invisible. Visibility-fail. Anyone-gives-a-crap-fail.

"Yes, you're going to do those things, but since millions of other people are doing that too, you're still invisible. Visibility-fail. Anyone-gives-a-crap-fail." Hmmm..., I think we can say millions of people do (or will do in the near future) the methods you describe. I don't see why are those methods harder to do than the methods you categorize as default stuff. I think what is hard is product market fit. You say: "Ask a technical founder about his startup, and he'll proudly describe his stunning software — simple, compelling, useful, fun." I think mostly this is the most important stuff unless someone is really incompetent at marketing. I think a really good product cannot win without any marketing, but a really good product can win with 'routine' marketing. Product market fit is always important. Whether even technical merits are very important depends on how hard the problem technically is. Why there are no other machine tranlators than Google Translate? Because they have bad marketing? No, because the problem is incredibly hard technically.