Thread

1. johnfn · 1789843452 · focus · HN ↗

   It’s a tale as old as time — people don’t understand that marketing and branding are just as important, if not more so, than the product. Jev is exceptionally-well branded. Anyone can look at the webpage and understand it, and the implications, instantly.

   OPs “marketing” is a single post on Reddit titled “ Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations using pure Reinforcement Learning”. Can you understand what that means? I can’t, and I consider myself reasonably technical. Is it obvious it has the same implications as Jev? Again, no idea. And it was just a single post on a subreddit that I don’t even browse! I see people on this thread saying “Jev is just BERT”. Sure, and Dropbox is just a ftp account mounted with curlftpfs!

   I do feel bad for the author for finding something cool and being unable to brand it. But the full definition of “product” INCLUDES being able to coherently communicate it. In some sense the branding is just as much the “breakthrough” as the model.

   1. rvz · 1789845102 · focus · HN ↗

      This 100%. Engineers really lack understanding in marketing and branding.

      No one cares if you are "first". They only care if your product is known by as many people as possible and is better than all the other alternatives at solving a problem that is worth paying for.

      If you don't market, then no-one will care that you exist even if you solved a problem decades ago. Someone else will use your solution and take inspiration (and credit) off of your discovery because you didn't bother to tell anyone about it.

      This is exactly what happened here.

      1. verdverm · 1789846722 · focus · HN ↗

         another way to look at it, a product is the whole experience (landing, docs, sales, support, code, branding), not the implementation of an algorithm or process

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