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For 100 years, it has been a truism that “the best product doesn’t win. The product with the best marketing wins.” At the risk of being thrown out of capitalist society, I claim that on the Web, this is no longer true. The best product often does win, with virtually no marketing, if it is easy to adopt.

In this new product cycle, figuring out how to get users to adopt is the hard and expensive thing. Marketing serves the adoption work by bringing in the right number of prospects for us to experiment with.