Jason M. Lemkin argues that startups who claim “we win every deal” are signaling a dangerous mix of hubris and lack of marketing. He warns that as startups begin competing with established vendors (e.g., Zendesk, HubSpot, Datadog), they will naturally lose deals because they are feature-poor, and thus need proper marketing to remain competitive.
A sixth bit of the sixth one is just a bit of hubris that I hear. It's a small flag, but it can scale over time, which is, oh, they're not a significant competitor. I mean, Shopify started with snowboard sales. I guess it was very good at that in the beginning. But. And so maybe in the very early days, you really will win every deal, because the prospects won't even bother with you unless this brand new vendor no one's heard of truly, truly solves a problem no one else solves. But after that, as you start to compete with Zendesk or HubSpot or Mongo or Datadog or whoever it is, you actually should start losing deals, because, of course, you're feature poor. Of course you don't have everything that those leaders have. So when I hear that we win every deal, I just know it means you're not doing any marketing.
