I asked a marketer with US-market experience to help grow my product. He told me he had no idea how to market it.
Honestly? Best feedback I've gotten all month.
Here's what nobody warns you about building something new: there's no playbook to copy. Marketers who run on playbooks hit a wall the second your product doesn't fit a template they've already run ten times.
For a while that scared me. If a pro doesn't know how to sell this, am I building the wrong thing?
Then it flipped. No playbook means I'm the one who gets to write it. Nobody knows this product and these users better than me. I'm in it 12 hours a day.
So I stopped hunting for someone to hand me the answer and started running my own experiments in public. Posting, testing hooks, watching what actually lands.
Slower. Messier. But this week it produced my first paying customer, which is more than any borrowed playbook ever gave me.
If you're building something genuinely new: the missing playbook isn't the problem. It's the moat.
Did you ever find a marketer who got your weird product, or did you end up becoming the marketer yourself?
I think there's an important distinction here. A missing playbook isn't automatically a moat. It only becomes one if the experiments you're running uncover something competitors can't easily copy. The founders who win usually aren't the ones who find the existing playbook—they're the ones who discover which assumptions about the market were wrong in the first place. That's much harder to replicate than a marketing tactic.