I think it's a shame that this article shortsells the importance of promotion and sales. I wonder if it was perhaps a backlash from Joel to the sales driven cul

I think it's a shame that this article shortsells the importance of promotion and sales. I wonder if it was perhaps a backlash from Joel to the sales driven culture of Microsoft. Promoting and selling your product is a discipline that forces you to answer some critical questions about what it actually is: 1. Who is going to buy your product - is it SMEs or individuals. If it's SMEs which ones in particular, how do you phrase things like your website copy to be meaningful for them 2. What do they want the product to do (e.g. Wufoo was online forms which was totally disruptive to administrative areas but actually ended up doing a lot of tailoring to online surveys which (I'm guessing) is where the market actually spends money) 3. How are you going to get customers - not everything is word of mouth. Some things are simply about distribution and good sales (what makes you buy the tin foil you choose - word of mouth?!) Developers always seem to hate the idea of actually promoting anything. There is a feeling that if you build it they will come. In general though they seldom do. Try to sell it and you'll find out what people actually do want. I wonder if developers hate promotion because it's hard. Whilst writing code is fun and engaging, cold calling to do some market research or to sell your product makes you feel uncomfortable and risks personal rejection. Sales is super-important and every company you admire does it Apple markets the life out of all of its products, Google has massive Adwords sales teams and Virgin America might be the best domestic airline but you can be sure their growth would not been have as great without the massive marketing campaign that went with it. I wish the many awesome software teams out there would stop spending so much time on product they think people want and start spending more time on selling it to people and discovering what they do want. The process isn't always fun but it is very, very informative.