Has anyone out there built a successful business without doing any marketing?

The lack of comments is very telling. We also need a thread "Has anyone out there built a successful business just by adding new features?"

Hi, I'm the creator of Shift - a SaaS providing automated upgrades of web applications using the Laravel framework. It recently crossed $1,000,000 in revenue.

I'd say I've done no marketing by modern standards. Especially not in the beginning. No ads of any kind. No followers. I was actually new to the market/community. I did have the benefit of "the right place at the right time" as I met the creator of the Laravel framework, Taylor Otwell, at a conference before launch. He did RT a few of my initial launch posts. Beyond that, I would say it was all "organic" and mostly word of mouth - developers telling other developers about the service.

So, I'd say it is possible. But requires compensation from other areas. In Shift's case, the attention of the #1 influencer in the market and a good product fit.

I'll also say I do run ads now with one of the community news sites. I also sponsor Laravel conferences from time to time. I honestly don't see a revenue bump from these. It's more about returning support to the Laravel community.

It really depends on what you mean by marketing. We have tried a lot of things randomly but almost none of them have worked. Almost all of our growth comes from organic: referrals and search engine traffic. We did not even set out to build an SEO-based business, it just sort of happened. But in the end, SEO is definitely "marketing" so I can't say I haven't done any marketing.

I suspect anyone who "doesn't do marketing" has a very strong and dialed-in baked-in virality loop, thus outsourcing the bulk of the marketing to the users, but that in itself is also a form of marketing, just less active.

Without active marketing the way is SEO. Be present when your potential customers are looking for solutions. Word of mouth later could add more.
Honestly SEO is kind of marketing too. 🤐

Marketing encompasses a wide range of promotional activities that aim to spread awareness about your company or product. Interestingly, even sharing information with friends and family can be considered a form of marketing. With that in mind, a relevant question for founders could be, "How much effort have you dedicated to your marketing activities?" Sorry for my nerdy answer 8-)

Yep I build analyes.com as a plugin for crisp.chat and in 3 months now I have 32 active subscribers ($1600 MRR) without doing anything in marketing at all

I think marketing is necessary in today's digital world. The competition out there in the market is fierce. If you don't do marketing, people will never know your product.

Hey!
I think I did. I spend 0$ on marketing every month and I rely 100% on organic search, referral, and word of mouth.

Here's the first course that I started 3 years ago: Learn JavaScript.

Having said that, I was very lucky that it made it to the top of Hacker News. A few months later , it was already on the 2nd page of Google. Since then, I just kept on improving based on user feedback and this has really worked for me. Along the way I've acquired links from several reputable sources (imagine universities linking to it as a resource for their students).

I've tried some marketing things here and there with very minimal budget but they never worked. I decided to not hire anyone for marketing on purpose and rather focus on honest marketing. So I avoid dark patterns on the payment page and just leave it up to the user. Do you want to buy it? Cool! You don't want to buy it? Great, we won't trick you into buying it.

I do have 2 other courses now and working on the 4th one. Let me know if you have other questions!

Was there any marketing for Wordle?

If by marketing, you mean paid advertising or hiring someone to create campaigns or marketing material…Then I can say I fall into that category.

I created some courses, digital products and a community for product designers and makers, all grown through organic content, search engine traffic, strategic partnerships and distribution channels.

I also do a lot of live online events. List building has been key.

https://designerup.co/

A few months ago we started working on our app, an integration for Slack that works like Pager Duty, but is entirely managed from Slack. The name of the app is Slack Beeper.

Initially we dedicated ourselves to having an MVP, and our focus was 100% development. After having that MVP we began to dedicate 50% of our time to marketing.
We are sharing our app in different channels like reddit, discord and linkedin.

We are currently in the process of generating some initial traction.

well, I guess we can call it in different ways... as marketing can be very different: from paid, to organic. Online or offline... Even talking about your product to someone is marketing...

to me the important questions is: did you find the right channel and messages for your audience?

Yes, somehow I built a somewhat profitable and successful design and media agency as a solo. Coming on 16 years now, and done some great work over those years.

For me the majority of the work came from connection and relationship, mostly with other freelancers or agency owners who had a distinct void in a particular creative field or area of expertise, that I was then able to fill.

Those individuals would put all the effort into finding the clients, cultivating the relationships, etc. So I never had to market myself, they instead would just call up or email with new work they wanted me to quote on or simply do because they’d already included me as part of the proposal.

Other clients came because I had already done work for organisations they were a part of, so they simply reached out and engaged me outside of that organisation.

I had one person find me through my business name at the bottom of a site I made. That’s the only client I can chalk up to “marketing” in 16 years.

The problem is it solely reliant on other people finding you work, so it is unpredictable. So at the moment I am branching out into offering subscription-models for my design, coding, and web expertise to try and balance the dramatic highs and lows that my model currently results in.

Yes, I did, but my product is only popular in my state's region because of its nature.
progati[dot]in
At that time, I was looking for ideas to build something. It was the end of 2014. One of my friends came to me and asked if I was interested in going with him to visit a school where his company sells school management software.
After reaching there, I found that the software was a huge disaster, and the school was complaining about it and wanting a refund. However, my friend somehow managed to manage the client, and we got back.
I found schools have a lot of problems making report cards and keeping accounts for students monthly fees. There are various fee structures. Issue of certificates like character certificates and transfer certificates to the students takes time.
To make a report card, they have to make a lot of effort, like marking entries, getting a rank, getting a grade, etc., for each individual student. It was frustrating.

I solved those problems via my school management software, Progati.

I asked those schools directly if they were interested in solving their problem via our software! One by one, schools buy our software, and they also refer us to another school; thus, we need any extra marketing effort to do so.

Later, develop a mobile app for parents to get the status of their child, get homework and classwork, and make fee payments on the mobile app in real time.

The journey is still going on, and now I am going to start another to solve those problems via another SAAS platform that I am facing during my Progati journey.

We're in the process of developing a product that enables customers to generate captivating 3D product videos with a cinematic feel. You can learn more about it googling Lumiere3D

Throughout our journey, we've explored various methods, and the most effective approach we've identified so far involves utilizing AI directories. These directories are abundant on the internet nowadays. Our strategy revolved around submitting our product to the most prominent directories first, which subsequently led to medium and smaller directories featuring our product on their platforms.

The outcome of this approach has been remarkable: we've amassed over 4,000 eager users on our waitlist in under three months.

For me, with my product https://fitworkoutroutine.com, a fitness IOS app targeted for beginners, marketing is a must. The apps store lacks SEO like web apps, so keyword optimization and strategically picking words is the only way to be noticed against all the other big-fitness branded apps. I'm sure this probably has some overlap with SEO, but the app store is more restrictive with limits on words. Also, getting the right screenshots and app previews for me is a form of marketing, as the first impression of your product is reflected by those previews.

Hi, I'm working on our product ConveyThis and is still impressed by how far we've gone without fancy marketing campaigns. We pride on building close-knit relationships with our clients just through our blogs and IG page.

Well right now our company Iconic Realtor hasn’t starts doing any advertising or marketing to get clients yet, how ever we have a remote sales team that I manage that books the appointment for our account executives.

We have only had one week so far with the team and none and only one of the Realtor signed up which was one I set.

I’m confident that with time that we will start to get a lot more realtors on board.

We’re giving a free trial of our marketing service for 10 days, with the expense of $300 to cover the adspend.

Then after the trial that we guarantee at least 1 closing in a year.

Our product is a website that helps students in the US find a trade school they might be interested in.

We are also offering a scholarship to any trade school in the US for aspiring trade professionals.

Visit our website: https://tradeschoolsnearme.co/https://www.tradeschoolsnearme.co/trade-school-scholarship

We tried advertising when it was launched, but probably because the product audience was too small, we found that advertising was still limited in acquiring users. We are an anti-detection browser, with the opening of multiple accounts, anti-association, secure management of multiple accounts, user account rights management these features (such as the same employee operating the account, will only allow different functions, responsible for the content of colleagues can only see the content module, while none of the access to the account password, the boss to control), our website is https://www.morelogin.com

The best form of marketing is when your customers don't know it's marketing 😉

It's a great question. My start up GoodQuestion.io (a note taking & collaboration tool designed for panel interviewers) is growing with advertising although the strangest thing is, most sales are coming from non-Google ads and I can't work out how.

Some people may believe it's possible and believe in pushing towards it, while others may think it's an impossible feat and consider it as a futile effort. It's important to have discussions and gather perspectives to arrive at a decision. Ultimately, only time will tell if it's possible or not.

Financial model, company profiles and pitch deck templates for all startups and businesses - https://airpitch.gumroad.com/

Hey there!

Have you ever heard of social listening? It basically listens to the internet. We use that internet chatter to create "lookalike audiences" that are more likely to be interested in your brand and ultimately lead to more growth and subscriptions.

If that sounds cool, check it out :D

https://hypercrowd.carrd.co

YESSSS!!! But I guess I'll have to start focusing on marketing since this market is too competitive. I sell powerpoint presentation templates online. You can get pitch decks, company profiles and other business presentations through my product. Do check it out and let me know how you feel about it - https://airpitch.gumroad.com/

Yep, we have built <a href="https://www.bmsauditing.com/">BMS Auditing</a> without using any paid marketing tactics

As a 10+ year tech marketer, I think the misconception of what counts as marketing is still so prevalent meaning many people will think they've not done any 'marketing' but in actual fact, it's so multi-faceted that you basically cannot avoid it.

My advice, define your 'ideal customer', solve their problems with your product/service, go to where they hang out (e.g. online - reddit, twitter etc), share value and build great connections with them. Referrals, word of mouth etc is a great way to grow but you'll only get that if you start delivering value to your target audience first.

I'm no expert on marketing, but I think that if your product is in a small enough niche it's doable. If your customers often talk with one another (say for example you are targeting college students) then word of mouth is also very powerful. With my app, I've decided that I will not spend a single cent on ads, and I will rely entirely on organic growth. hopefully it will work :)

I wouldn't say they did it without any marketing but there are many product-led companies such as Slack and dropbox that relied more on products.

https://amplitude.com/blog/product-led-growth-companies

I agree with many of the comments here, in this day and age to get the level of "success" that most folks seem to be looking for it's going to be an uphill battle without some sort of marketing. If you're in it for the long game and don't have grand ambitions of getting funded and scaling rapidly then the opportunities for that level of success are much more achievable.

I'd consider my app Be Inclusive as the latter, it was something I built to fill a rather niche but complicated need to manage digital accessibility audits and decided to turn it into an affordable product that other freelancers and agencies could afford so they too can do right by their clients and consider accessibility in the products they deliver.

I have a very modest number of subscribers but it's enough to cover my costs, and for me that's a level of success of which I am proud. I don't have dazzline MRR numbers or even particularly steady growth, but the customers that do engage with me about it are genuinely happy with it. Now that's a success metric I take very seriously.

I think this was possible in the early days of the Internet, where everything was new. Like, I don't think Zuckerberg was very concerned about marketing. He was first to build something new and unique, and that was probably enough.
Now, we all dream about instant success we saw in "The Social Network", but the environment has much changed since then!
There are so many websites, apps & services on the Internet currently. It seems like it's getting more and more about marketing / distribution of your product, than the product itself

I guess its possible, consider wikipedia, just provide huge value to clients/customers
even take example of https://www.desiqna.in/ , founder forgot about website for 6 months and his personal brand on linkdin helped website to grow. today it holds web value worth > 1M $

I don't think it's possible. You optimized a text on the registration button while writing the code, even subconsciously - boom, you're doing some marketing. Even simple things like "Sign up now!" instead of "Registration". Not even talking about ads. And if you told your friends about your startup, that's marketing as well.

As long as the main goal is related to the term "business," there is no way but to do marketing of your business element. The whole scenario depends on how you perceive the terms - business, marketing, and success.

I've been doing well with my product ZoZo App so far. We've been out for little over a month and we continue to grow each day.

ZoZo allows you to create Keyboard Shortcuts for the Photos, Links & Files you want to share at any time.

I started this product because I was constantly searching for my favorite photos of my newborn son to share, constantly copy & pasting links, etc.

I thought to myself there has to be an easier way to reference & share this content. That's how I thought of Keyboard Shortcuts, with ZoZo you save a specific piece of content (photo, link, file) to a Keyboard Shortcut. When you want to use a Keyboard Shortcut just tap on it right from your Keyboard and it will share the content attached to that shortcut!

You can check out ZoZo here:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/zozo-app/id1639795583

I think I'm qualified enough to answer this question as I still remember how I landed my first two customers for https://growthingly.com without much marketing efforts.

I actually targetted niche reddit communities & facebook groups by my own, didn't hired any marketer at that time. I admit that interacting with people took most of time but it was really worth it as I was able to understand their industry & pain point that can be solved by our services.

It's probably pretty hard. I built an AI writing assistant and didn't do any marketing. However, the traffic has been bad.

The problem with no marketing is that you won't get enough quality backlinks to boost your SEO. Thus, you can't get organic traffics.

My site: https://writableai.com

Greetings👋, I'm the creator / curator of bezier.design - a media for creatives about design for everyone who works in the design industry. Bezier was actually ready to go in 3 weeks but it could have been even less than that.

Actually, Bezier was one of the ideas that solves my problem - spending 4-5 hours a day in social media looking for design inspiration and stuff like that, also mixing it with personal feed, so it was a mess there.

One moment I thought why not to suggest it to other people and the only place I thought I can do this was Product Hunt, really quick, just to validate its' worth.

So, I've launched Bezier on Product Hunt next day after the launch. Next day I've got not only some upvotes an first subs, but also found first people that are willing to pay for subscription. That was a surprise, didn't really expect any paid customers within a month. So, basically I've spend $0 for marketing or for any kind of promotion.

Right now I bring some word about Bezier and its' experience here, to IH, and expecting to find the right community for the journal. Hope this insight helps. Cheers

PH page: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/bezier

Website: https://www.bezier.design/

You can't build a successful business without doing any marketing. If you think you can, then you don't understand what marketing is.

Basin just crossed the $100,000 revenue milestone without really any concerted marketing efforts. Most of our growth has been organic since launch in October 2017. Chris Coyer mentioned us in a few of his presentations, and we've had a few people post personal reviews or comparisons with other form backend products.

In recent months, we've started focusing more on improving SEO through additional content generation and applying learnings and adjusting our strategy as needed.

I'm currently working on BotMeNot, but I can't say that I'm not doing marketing. Especially if what you're referring to means literally not ever mentioning your product to anyone except for the people you're working with.

I'm currently still exploring all the marketing channels, at the moment being focused on social media (mostly TW).

Obviously, SEO is an ongoing thing and I try to be as active as I can on communities such as IH.

Hi, I'm Giannis, founder of databloo.com , a bootstrapped company that offers ready-to-use Data Studio Templates for online businesses (zero-code products). In terms of Marketing, I haven't spent any budget on ads (paid search, display, etc.), and the traffic is coming from organic growth. More specifically Google Data Studio team has selected some of the Data Bloo's dashboards to be featured on their official gallery as:

Top Featured Reports
https://datastudio.google.com/gallery?search=data bloo

Community Reports
https://datastudio.google.com/gallery?category=community&search=data bloo

Result:

1. Create brand awareness (search terms such as data bloo, databloo on search engine results)
2. Increase in branded traffic (direct + organic search traffic landing to the homepage)
3. Significant impact in SEO (domain authority, organic search for new blog pages)

It’s not enough for me to give up my job (in fact I ’m taking no plutocrat from the business at all except for buying myself a new mega shit hot MacBook Pro out of the business) but it’s structure up a nice sum in the business bank account. Songbox has grown purely organically. In the near future we ’re gon na put some of the plutocrat we ’ve squirreled into some decent juggernauts.

I'm very surprised that no one has mentioned Tesla. I'm no Tesla fanboy, I've never even been in one of their vehicles. (Tbh I am under the impression they need another few years in the market before I'd consider even thinking about looking to buy one, as they seem to have built a reputation similar to the "move fast, break everything" or whatever fb's old mantra used to be)

But I do admire Elon in one way - in that I believe he is an absolute Master at marketing. Perhaps he is well at hiding the fact that it's actually someone behind the scenes that has created his publicity but I believe that it is him that has learned how to leverage, practically, "free lifetime automated marketing".

I think this is why his businesses are successful. Everyone thinks he is some poly/multifaceted genius in several different categories. Which I believe is totally false. I believe he has simply mastered the science of both free marketing and vitality. He also knows how to hire people to do what he would like to do, and afterwards tries to learn as much as possible so that he is able to understand how he can best play role as an executive.

Like others have said, this original question is EXTREMELY broadly termed in more than one way. I would say that it is impossible to grow any business without any kind of marketing, as even referrals are considered a type of marketing. But on the other hand, I do believe it is totally possible to grow even the biggest business in the world without paid marketing . But to do so your product best be well in demand, solve many peoples problems like no other, and understand human phycology enough to leverage ways to get your product to the masses without having to pay a dime in the sense of what's typically thought to be considered mainstream marketing, by paying for adspace in the physical and or digital world.

I could write an entire paper on why musk has mastered this, but this post is already way longer then I'd like it to be. I'll finish off by saying that while he does not spend any money directly in the sense of paid ads, that's not to say it didn't cost him in many other ways whether that be his own time learning, or even things such as the design of his little toys that he likes to sell every so often such as his flame thrower, or "short shorts", or even Tesla's own alcohol.

Sorry for the length, good luck to all, I've read all the responses here and appreciate the knowledge on everyone else's experience!

Tech selling to tech, maybe. The rest of us - A SaaS is 40% tech, 5% ops, 55% marketing and sales. Duh!

define "marketing"?

Many, many businesses have become successful without marketing but once they are, why not use some of the profits on marketing to grow faster?

One great thing about the internet is that it pushes superior product to the top. If you make something people really want, they’ll share it on Reddit, they’ll recommend it to friends, they’ll give it five stars on the app/play/steam/whatever store. They’ll beat a path to your product.

But only if you made something people really want.

Examples: Minecraft, Canva, WordPress, VLC, PayPal, Discord (esp for gaming groups), Anki, Bitcoin, YouTube, Covid vaccines, SpaceX

Early on I had two influencers use and an post about the product and that was enough to prime the pump. That was a happy coincidence partly born from the fact the product had no rival at the time and a very clear pain point it was solving.

Tried other stuff since then (still trying). Having been around awhile and novel, SEO has been the major source aside from an initial bump from the influencers.

I think marketing is one of the most important aspects of building a project. Even products that have a huge fanbase and recognition make sure to keep up their game in marketing. Unless you have a lot of followers this seems like a tough task.

Yes there are entire categories of product which have huge demand and naturally constrained supply. For example an "Android FCP Zero click" can be sold for $2.5M to Zerodium.

Clearly when someone is publicly advertising they will pay for something you don't have to market it.

Would you count a dev shop?

I started Stack Five in 2018 as a business for my contracting work.

Focused on growing and scaling in 2020/21 and grew to 5 full-time devs (hoping to hire one more this year) and ~$50k MRR.

All of the business came through business development. We're just starting to focus on marketing this year to fill up the top of our lead funnel.

maybe a better frame, has anyone built a company without any paid traffic and used just organic growth via a decent marketing site and minimal engagement with folks in communities.

I think this is the start of any marketing/discovery. And wait to do paid traffic till you think you have some product<>market-fit.

What do you mean by not marketing?

My Russian-English dictionary OpenRussian grew to $2000/month without any significant marketing efforts. It took 7 years though, but it's still growing linearly and is indeed very passive income, I just add new features from time to time when I feel like it.

I wouldn't recommend it though as it took such a long time and it's in no way guaranteed that you gain more users over time..

Successful and marketing are very broad terms. And that’s a good thing I guess.
I built a simple app that gets all the traffic with ASO (SEO for apps) and it doesn’t make millions but it’s on autopilot.

Getfoyl.com

I used to acquire customers with only referrals. So far it’s been successful. But these are thanks to friends who told someone else about my service. Is this considered as marketing? 😅

This is only possible if you already got the many followers. I'm just saying. People with many followers got some sort of leverage or a head start with little to no marketing needed.

Even the most well known brands market. Ever seen those Coca Cola ads ? Think about it. So No. Without Marketing, you will not be relevant as there is lot of noise and competition in the market. If you are not well known, even harder without marketing.

It is possible but extremely hard. You must tap into a market with huge demand and no solutions. I have interviewed many entrepreneurs in my podcast and from all the interviews there were only two cases where they were able to monetize their products with minimal marketing. One was Pieter Levels with nomadlist and the other was Giordano with his youtube channel thejuicemedia

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