This is generally good advice, and it's well articulated. But respectfully, I don't think it's a fair critique of the article. First, because marketing and prod

This is generally good advice, and it's well articulated. But respectfully, I don't think it's a fair critique of the article. First, because marketing and product development are not dichotomous operations. Both seem to be necessary to break out of the increasingly crowded app marketplace, and a "build it and they will come" strategy is not sufficient. There are plenty of beautiful, elegant, astoundingly creative games that are languishing in the App Store for lack of discovery (driven by insufficient or inattentive marketing). I did not find that the author was advocating marketing tactics to the exclusion of development efforts, or to the exclusion of product differentiation. You say that his tactics, "in isolation," are not effective -- but the author wasn't claiming that they should be used in isolation. He happened to be focusing on them in this article, because this article was specifically about launch tactics. It was covering one small area of a broad spectrum of efforts required in app development. That doesn't imply a suggestion that this is the only area. While it's true that a developer should focus first and foremost on making an amazing product (and on making himself amazing), he shouldn't ignore the tactics offered by this article and others like it. There will come a time when his app is built, and when he's getting ready to launch. When that time comes, he would be well served to have a launch strategy, and some tactics he can draw upon to execute that strategy. Building a magnificent app, then simply tossing it into the wind and hoping for the best, is doing disservice to the effort you put in to build that app.