Transcript excerpt from a podcast/panel where the speaker (Jason M. Lemkin) argues that startups often over-focus on product development and under-invest in sales and marketing. The speaker emphasizes the need to proactively drive top-of-funnel demand and convert that demand into revenue, noting purely organic growth is now rare.
Not just because I'm on this podcast that's what I that's where I usually observe it and I'll give you a couple reasons why I see it that way. You usually expect your your heads down especially like early days your heads down building an incredible product which you should be doing but at some point you need to get it out there to the world right and you need to drive like you said top of the funnel. You need to drive some level of demand right and you need to close that demand and demand into dollars and what I see happen is you expect big things but you under invest in like the sales and marketing side so it doesn't mean you need to go crazy right but sometimes if you don't have somebody who's capable of a demand gen person to drive demand right you're you're going to struggle in driving demand right Unless it's a purely organic business which is quite frankly is extremely rare these days. So that's one thing I'd call out.
