Wilson's post, which the OA was referring, actually jives with my own current "best practice" ideals, namely: 1. don't take investment. it over-complicates thi

Wilson's post, which the OA was referring, actually jives with my own current "best practice" ideals, namely: 1. don't take investment. it over-complicates things, and it's better to get money from customers anyway. it scales up and down better. customers hate you? well, you won't be burning much money because there's nothing much to burn. customers love you? you'll have more money, which in turn makes it easier to acquire more customers 2. don't advertise. less money spent on advertising is more for, oh, product development and "keeping the lights on" and metaphorical Ramen, and less need for investment. also, less advertising means less wiggle room for your product to suck. with less advertising, your product MUST be better, inherently, and people MUST want to tell others about it more, inherently. these are good things. a virtuous cycle. that said, of course, given two otherwise good products/teams/markets, yes an advantage will go to whoever can advertise more. but it's rare that you have two otherwise identical and equally good products competing at the exact same time and with the same feature set and market. if it happens, fine, advertise. but probably the smarter strategy is to keep your head down and focused on the product, and to pick niches which don't appear to have big money competitors (yet). I believe there's a bottleneck and shortage of talent and taste in the world, with probably time the second most bottleneck, and both money and ideas are much farther down the list. Therefore, advantage goes to those with more talent & taste, under otherwise equal conditions. take all this with grain of salt, as I'm somewhere between semi-am/semi-pro and wantrepreneur at this point.