That used to work back when more people were building things to scratch an itch and didn't have a good sense of business and marketing. Today, you can expect a

That used to work back when more people were building things to scratch an itch and didn't have a good sense of business and marketing. Today, you can expect a product that launches to be extremely polished and have a very calculated marketing strategy from the original pitch, to some kind of an invitation list of early adopters, a lot of blogging time invested, and lastly, a sales team of some sort. A lot of them will have some kind of financial backing. And best of all, you won't even know to what degree their image and branding is curated to sell one story ("We're a small shop") vs reality ("We are very well connected with decision makers at important companies", etc). Basically, it was taken from a fun side project and perfected to a business science on an industry-wide scale when the sharks smelled how much money was on the table.