Marketing is not advertising, and it is not a dirty word. It is the toll booth between the thing you made and the people who need it.
I once spent an entire weekend writing what I still think is one of the best tutorials I have ever produced. It walked a reader from raw FASTQ files to an annotated VCF, with every parameter justified and every common error documented. I published it on ngs101.com on a Sunday night feeling like I had handed the bioinformatics community a gift.
Two weeks later I opened the analytics. Eleven pageviews. Four of them were mine.
That same month, someone posted a rough, half-correct thread on the same topic and it went everywhere. Screenshots showed up in lab Slack channels. People were quoting it back to me.
My first reaction was the one most technically competent people have: the internet is broken and attention is stupid. My second reaction took considerably longer to arrive. I had made something. I had not marketed it. And I had spent years quietly assuming those were the same activity.
The book that finally broke that assumption for me was This Is Marketing by Seth Godin. What follows is what I took from it, filtered through a decade of watching brilliant people in academic labs build excellent things that nobody ever used.
Why Marketing Has Such a Bad Reputation, and What That Reputation Costs You
Ask ten people to define marketing and nine will describe advertising they resent. The pre-roll ad on the video they wanted to watch. The banner that follows a single mattress search across four unrelated websites for six weeks. The email from a company they bought socks from in 2019.
Every one of those is a stranger asking for a slice of a salary you already earned. Most of them do not work, which is the part that should be interesting rather than reassuring. Enormous budgets go toward interruptions almost nobody wants, and the people spending them frequently cannot tell you whether it worked.
So marketing arrives in most of our minds pre-labeled. I once heard it described in a university hallway as the mechanism by which capital extracts value from labor, and I held some version of that view for years, mostly because it flattered me. If marketing is shady, then my eleven pageviews were a badge of integrity instead of a failure of nerve.
That belief is comfortable and it is expensive, because it quietly determines what kind of working life you end up with.
The Ghostwriter Problem
You know the founder of your company is worth somewhere between a hundred and a hundred thousand times what you are paid. You have probably done that math on a bad afternoon. So why do most of us, including people who are objectively sharper than the person signing the checks, choose the wage?
The usual answers are risk tolerance, capital, and connections. Those matter. But watch what happens in the one industry where the worker demonstrably possesses the entire means of production.
There are ghostwriters earning a few cents a word on books that sell hundreds of thousands of copies. The writing is theirs. The structure is theirs. In many cases the insight is theirs too, extracted from a client over a series of interviews and then made coherent by someone who knows how to make a paragraph work. And they hand over the upside for a flat fee.
Not because they cannot write a book. They just wrote one. They hand it over because everything after the manuscript looks unbearable. Finding a publisher, building an audience, asking strangers for attention, having your name on something that might fail in public. The writing is the part they love. The marketing is a toll booth, and rather than pay the toll they sell the car.
I watched a version of this constantly in academia. In my previous lab, the person who wrote the pipeline was almost never the person whose name opened doors. The junior researcher did the analysis. The principal investigator did the talks, the introductions, the hallway conversations at conferences that turned into collaborations. Both were doing real work. Only one was accumulating something that compounds.
The uncomfortable conclusion I reached is that a wage is not payment for labor. It is payment for someone else handling distribution. And we accept that trade at a discount because we have confused distribution with the ads we hate.
Which means the real question is not whether marketing is distasteful. It is whether the thing we have been calling marketing is marketing at all.
What Marketing Actually Is: The Act of Making Change Happen
Here is the definition that dismantled the whole thing for me. Marketing is the act of making change happen. That is all of it. You have not marketed until someone thinks or acts differently than they otherwise would have.
Nothing in that definition mentions money, attention, or interruption. Under it, advertising is one tactic among many, and a fairly desperate one, for buying a change you have not otherwise earned.
It also means marketing is not something a department does. It is something you have been doing your whole life.
You Are Already a Marketer, Whether You Planned On It Or Not
Every one of us markets at least one thing continuously from adolescence until death, and that thing is ourselves.
You market yourself every time you apply for a job. A resume is a positioning document that makes a promise to a specific audience about a change you will produce inside their organization. The good ones are ruthlessly targeted at one reader. The bad ones try to appeal to everyone, which is why they read like nothing at all.
Teaching taught me this more directly than anything else I have done. You cannot compel anyone to learn. You can stand at the front of a room with a correct, well-organized explanation and watch it fail completely, because the students in front of you have not yet decided they want what you are holding. The sessions that worked were never the ones where my slides were cleanest. They were the ones where I opened with a problem the person in the third row was already stuck on. I was not simplifying content. I was earning the right to be listened to, which is a marketing problem wearing a lecturer’s clothes.
The same thing happens sideways in a lab. If you want the group to adopt a new workflow, being right is only the entry fee. You have to make the current way feel unacceptable to someone who is already busy, already competent, and already invested in the thing you want them to abandon. I have seen better methods lose that fight repeatedly, and it was never the methods that lost.
You do it in your personal life too, when you introduce a partner to a skeptical family or talk a friend into a doctor they have never heard of. In every case you are moving a person from where they are to somewhere you believe is better, using stories and trust rather than force. None of that is structurally different from what a business does. Businesses just attach invoices.
So the choice was never whether to learn marketing. I had been doing it badly for fifteen years. The only real choice is whether to do it on purpose, and doing it on purpose means understanding why anyone changes their mind in the first place.
The Psychology of Change: Why People Actually Move
This is the part I wish I had learned first, because every tactic later in this article is a consequence of it. If marketing is making change happen, then the operating question is not “where do I post” but “what actually moves a human being.”
Status Is the Engine of Culture
Why does someone drive past three perfectly good coffee shops to reach a specific one? Why does a person turn down a better-paying job to stay in a role that is making them miserable? If a decision looks irrational from outside, you are almost certainly missing the status calculation that made it obvious from inside.
Academia is an unusually clean laboratory for this, because the money is bad enough that status is the only currency left. Author order on a paper is worth more than a raise. Whose name goes second on a grant can end a friendship. I have watched people accept worse pay for a better title and understood it completely.
The consequence is the single most useful thing I know about change. Culture does not shift because you are right. If being right were sufficient, we would have adopted every better idea the moment it appeared. Culture shifts when status shifts.
Dominance and Affiliation: The Two Scoreboards
Status is not one thing, though, and confusing the two versions of it is expensive.
Some people keep score vertically. Their questions are about rank and power. Who has more, is this mine or yours, did I win. Uber built its early brand almost entirely on this, fighting regulators and competitors in public, and a specific segment of drivers, investors, and riders found that thrilling rather than alarming.
Others keep score horizontally. Their questions are about belonging. Who else is here, who knows me, am I in sync with my people. Most of modern creative and internet culture runs on this, which is why so much marketing effort goes toward the simple job of showing that the right people have already arrived. Who blurbed the book. How crowded the launch looks. Which logos sit at the bottom of the announcement.
The trap is assuming your audience keeps score the way you do. A retail executive who personally finds discounts undignified can walk into a company whose customers love the sport of bargain hunting, strip out the coupons in the name of elegance, and destroy half the revenue. His worldview was coherent. It simply was not theirs.
I made a smaller version of that mistake for years. I write for people who want to understand mechanisms, because that is how I keep score. A meaningful share of my actual readers are graduate students who mainly want to avoid looking stupid in Thursday’s lab meeting. That is a status need, and it was not the one I was serving. Nothing about my content had to change. The opening paragraphs did.
Tension Creates Motion, and Trust Makes It Safe
Knowing what someone wants is not enough to make them move. People stay put by default, because the current arrangement, however bad, is already survivable.
What produces motion is tension, and this is the concept I resisted longest, because creating tension sounded like manipulation. It is not the same as fear. Fear paralyzes people and puts them in suspended animation, holding their breath. Tension is the sensation of standing at a threshold, aware that something might work and might not, aware that you do not yet know the thing you are about to know.
Every good teacher creates it, which is how I finally accepted it. Just before you learn anything, you become conscious that you do not know it, and that gap is uncomfortable in a way that produces movement. Naming a specific thing a reader cannot yet do is not a trick played on them. It is a form of respect, because it treats them as someone capable of crossing the gap.
But tension alone just produces anxiety. The counterweight is trust. You need the reader to believe the gap is real and to believe the person pointing at it will not leave them stranded inside it. Tension gives the reason to move, trust gives the permission, and neither one works alone. Show someone the gap without the trust and they close the tab feeling worse than when they arrived.
We Buy Feelings, Not Features
The last piece is what people are moving toward, and it is almost never the thing you think you are selling.
When I got serious about this I wrote out the emotional states people actually pay for. Belonging. Control. Safety. Respect. Freedom. Relief from anxiety. Being seen as capable. Nostalgia. Power. The list is short, which is oddly encouraging, because a small palette is enough to paint almost anything, and every product you have ever loved is one of these wearing a costume.
I do not sell tutorials. I sell the feeling of walking into a meeting with your own analysis, having done it yourself, and not needing to apologize for anything. The commands are the delivery mechanism.
Two warnings come with this. First, people confuse wants with needs constantly, and almost everything past food, shelter, and health is a want dressed up. Second, asking people what they want will not get you there. People know their wants intimately and are terrible at imagining new ways to satisfy them, so they describe a faster version of what they already have. Your job is to watch what they do, infer what they dream about, and then build a transaction that delivers the feeling.
Status, tension, trust, and feeling. That is the entire engine, and it is the same engine whether you have a billion dollars or a laptop. What differs is only what each budget can afford to do with it. It is worth looking at what the billion buys before deciding what to copy.
How Big Brands Use the Engine: Apple, Pepsi, and Ads That Sell Nothing
If mass advertising is so often wasteful, why do the most sophisticated companies on earth keep buying it?
Because they are not trying to sell you anything in those thirty seconds. This took me embarrassingly long to see.
Watch a Pepsi ad from any era and count the product claims. Nobody is telling you about carbonation levels or price per ounce. You are shown young people having a better time than you are, and the association being built is not between Pepsi and thirst. It is between Pepsi and being the kind of person who belongs in that scene. That is affiliation, purchased at scale.
Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl commercial is the purest version I know. It ran once, almost nobody watching football caught the Orwell references, and it mentioned no specification of the computer it advertised. What it did was signal to a small number of media people and technical enthusiasts that there was a side to be on, and that Apple was the side against the grey conformity those people already resented. Roughly a million people needed to receive that signal. Everyone else was allowed to be confused.
Neither ad is selling. Both are moving feelings, which is the only lever that shifts a market.
Brand Marketing Is Patience, and Patience Is What Money Buys
There are two fundamentally different activities hiding under the word marketing, and the distinction matters enormously for what you can afford.
Direct response can be measured this afternoon. Someone clicked, someone bought, the math works or it does not. Brand marketing cannot be measured at all. It is the accumulation of every interaction: how you answer an email, what your packaging feels like, whether you reply to a comment two years after publishing, how your team behaves when nobody is watching.
That accumulation is exactly what a large budget purchases. Apple spent thirty years converting a signal sent to a million people into one of the most valuable companies on earth. The signal was not the asset. The thirty years were.
This is also the most useful constraint I have taken from any of it: nobody has enough time or money to build a brand for everyone, including the companies you are copying. So be specific to a degree that feels excessive, then overinvest in that narrow promise until every part of the experience reflects it.
Organizing and Leading a Tribe
What people mock as the Apple cult is the actual product. Apple sells hardware, but what it built is a group with shared language, shared symbols, shared enemies, and a shared sense of taste, who recognize each other on sight. The white earbuds were a flag before they were headphones.
One caveat keeps this from turning ugly. The tribe is not yours. You do not own the people who gather around your work and you do not get to aim them at your goals. If you are useful, they will interpret what you say in a way that advances something they already wanted. The whole thing survives without you, and the goal is only to be missed if you left.
Here is the problem with all of it, though. None of it scales down. If you copy the tactics of an organization whose real assets are reach and patience, you will spend money you do not have buying attention you cannot convert. The small operation has to run the same engine in reverse.
The Small Business Inversion: Start With the Smallest Viable Market
Apple has to build a brand for hundreds of millions of people, and that constraint costs decades and billions. You are not in that game, and this is the most liberating fact in the entire discipline.
There are online businesses serving fewer than ten customers that comfortably fund their owners’ lives. A former grad school colleague runs a subscription platform teaching advanced microscopy techniques with a team of three and a few thousand subscribers. Neither has a brand in the Coca-Cola sense. Both are indispensable to a specific group, which turns out to be worth more than being vaguely known to everyone.
So instead of asking how many people you could possibly reach, ask the inverse. What is the smallest number of people you would need to serve properly for this to be worth doing?
If you read my breakdown of the Lean Startup method, the parallel is exact and not accidental. A minimum viable product is the smallest build that produces real learning. A smallest viable market is the smallest audience that produces a real business. Both attack the same instinct, which is our compulsion to go big before we have gone right. And both contain a word people conveniently forget. In minimum viable product, the word is viable, and it means no shipping junk. In smallest viable market, the word is viable, and it means the group has to be able to sustain you.
Chasing mass makes you boring, and it has to. Mass means average, average means offending nobody, and offending nobody means saying nothing anyone repeats.
How to Find Your Smallest Viable Market
Four questions, in this order, written down, because vague answers are how this exercise dies.
What change am I making, stated specifically enough to verify? Not “help scientists with bioinformatics.” Something closer to “take a wet lab biologist who has never opened a terminal and get them to where they can run and troubleshoot an RNA-seq pipeline alone.” That either happened or it did not.
What is the minimum number of people for whom that change has to happen? If the honest answer is three hundred readers, then everything I would do to reach three million is wasted motion, and worse, it dilutes whatever makes me worth finding.
What do those people already believe? Not what I wish they believed. Mine largely believe the command line is a barrier erected by gatekeepers, that their supervisor will not give them time to learn it properly, and that every existing tutorial assumes knowledge they do not have. I did not install any of that and I cannot afford to argue with it. I can only build on it.
Who is at the extreme? Find the corner of the market that is underserved to the point of frustration and go all the way to their edge, until you are not the better option but the only sane one.
The bravery here is the specificity. Specific means accountable. It worked or it did not, it spread or it did not, and there is nowhere to hide.
Who You Are Actually Talking To
Demographics tell you what someone is. You need to know what someone wants, so I write out three or four personas with names and internal monologues.
One of mine is a second-year PhD student whose supervisor just handed her a hard drive of sequencing data and an expectation, who is frightened of looking incompetent, and who needs a win before Thursday. Another is a staff scientist who knows the biology cold, resents depending on the core facility for basic analysis, and wants control rather than reassurance. Those two people need completely different first paragraphs on the same tutorial, and until I had written them down I was writing for neither.
There is also a distribution fact worth internalizing. In any group, a small minority actively want new things and will try the unfinished version. Most people are content with what they have and are not looking for you at all. A stubborn tail will defend the current way until they retire. You cannot afford to manufacture dissatisfaction in someone who is already satisfied, so start with the people who have the problem and are already searching, and let the middle arrive later through them.
Once you know who, the tactics stop being a menu to choose from. Each one is just the psychology from earlier, applied at a scale you can afford.
Five Moves That Work Without a Budget
Tell stories instead of specifications. People do not remember parameters. They remember what happened to them. The tutorials of mine that travel are never the most complete ones, they are the ones that open with a specific failure: the nine hours I lost debugging a pipeline because of a trailing whitespace in a sample sheet, the analysis I redid three times before noticing the reference build did not match the annotation. Those stories cost nothing and do two jobs at once, making the reader feel seen and proving I have been where they are. The structure underneath is worth naming, because it is the same one every movement uses. Story of self, which earns you standing by showing a transition from who you were to who you became. Story of us, which explains why that transition is relevant to the person reading. Story of now, which makes it urgent and collective. I was stuck. Here is what I learned. You are stuck in the same place, and we can fix it now.
Be unbeatable in a very small world. Nobody needs another general bioinformatics resource. There are excellent ones, they are free, and I would lose that fight in a week. What I can do is be the best resource in existence for a wet lab biologist attempting sequencing analysis without a computational mentor. Inside that small world I can be genuinely unbeatable, because the people who could beat me technically have no interest in writing for that reader, and the people interested in that reader do not have my background. Every small operation has this move available and almost nobody makes it, because narrowing feels like shrinking. It is the opposite. Reasonable options for wide audiences never get discussed.
Sell the transformation, not the tool. This follows directly from the emotional palette above. Name the feeling on the far side and build everything around delivering it. Competence. The end of a particular kind of dread. If you cannot state the transformation in one sentence, you are still selling features.
Send signals that say “this is for you.” Busy people scan rather than study, and the question running underneath the scan is always the same: what does this remind me of? That is semiotics, and you are participating whether you intend to or not. The typeface, the density of the page, the words you refuse to define because your reader already knows them. It is why most car ads look alike, since sameness signals safety for an expensive decision, and why fashion advertising looks nothing like outdoor gear advertising. The practical version is to send a signal your people already trust, then alter it just enough that it is unmistakably yours. My tutorials look like documentation rather than marketing, because documentation is the format my readers trust. Dressed up as a sales page, the content would not matter, because the flag would already be wrong.
Give away ideas and charge for the expression of them. Free behaves differently from cheap. Cheap is a slightly smaller number, but free is a different category, because it divides by zero and scales to infinity. An idea with no price attached moves through a community at a speed a priced idea never will. You cannot eat attention, though, and there are two real reasons not to give everything away: a transaction creates commitment that a free download never does, and without cash flow you cannot invest in the work. So run both, deliberately paired. A chef publishes her recipes and charges for the pasta on the tablecloth. A song is free on streaming and the concert ticket is not. The meal and the ticket are souvenirs of ideas, and souvenirs are supposed to cost money.
Those five moves get you found by the right people. Something different has to happen for that to turn into a business, because being found once is not worth much.
What Makes It Compound: Permission, Remarkability, and Trust
The reason free content builds anything at all is that it produces three assets simultaneously: awareness, permission, and trust. Awareness is the cheap one. The other two are where the compounding lives.
Permission is the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who would be concerned if you stopped. Not people whose email addresses you acquired, not people who failed to unsubscribe, not people technically covered by a line in a privacy policy. People who would write and ask where you went.
Two unpopular things follow. You earn it slowly, and then you keep the deal exactly as made. If someone signed up for a weekly tutorial, they signed up for a weekly tutorial, not for your launch and not for your quarterly push. And an audience on a social platform is not permission, it is tenancy. You are farming someone else’s land, the rent changes whenever their revenue requires it, and one algorithm adjustment can erase three years of work. Own the direct line and rent the rest.
Remarkability is what fills the permission asset, and the crucial point is that it is not your decision. If people remark on it, it is remarkable. If they do not, it is not, no matter how hard the work was. Stunts do not count either, because people rarely share things because you impressed them. They share because sharing says something flattering about their own taste. When a reader forwards my tutorial to a labmate, they are partly saying “this is useful” and partly saying “look at what I find,” and both have to be true.
Permission and remarkability then feed each other. A remarkable thing gets discussed, which brings people who grant permission, which gives you an audience to build the next remarkable thing for. Slow at the start, absurd at the end.
Trust is the input both of them depend on, and it comes from what you do rather than what you say. We remember what you did long after we forget what you said. When the product failed, what did you do. When someone asked for a refund they were arguably not owed, what did you do. Most people spend their time deciding what to say and almost none deciding what to do, and that ratio is backwards. Talking means holding a press conference. Doing means what happens when nobody is watching, one person at a time, repeatedly.
My version of this is answering the emails from readers who are stuck. It does not scale, which is precisely why it works. Somebody who was stuck on a Wednesday night and got a real answer from a human being tells people, and no campaign produces that.
Worth remembering alongside it: everyone is famous to roughly fifteen hundred people. Being genuinely known to the right three thousand is enough to build a life on. The goal was never to maximize a follower count.
Build In a Reason to Share
The strongest growth mechanism is not persuasion. It is design.
The fax machine did not spread because of clever advertising. It spread because a fax machine is nearly useless alone and valuable the moment your colleagues have one. Every new user made the network more painful to sit outside of. The same logic runs under every messaging app, marketplace, and professional standard that ever won.
So the question is not how to convince people to tell their friends. It is whether your work gets better for a user when other people use it too. If the answer is no, you are relying on generosity, and generosity is a thin engine.
I have not fully solved this for my own work and I would rather say so than pretend. Tutorials are not inherently networked. What I can build is shared vocabulary and shared reference points, so two people who both learned from ngs101.com can talk to each other more efficiently than either could with a stranger. That is a weak network effect, but it is real, and it beats writing into the void.
The Most Important Person You Will Ever Market To
All of the above depends on one person continuing to show up for years, which brings me to the audience I forget most often.
You are already telling yourself a story every day. That you are unknown and probably deserve to be. That the people winning have advantages you lack. That your work is too niche, too technical, too late. I have run all of those, sometimes simultaneously. Those stories are as true as you make them, because they determine what you publish, how often, and whether you extend yourself toward a stranger who needs what you know.
The reframe that moved me is blunt. If you have something that would help someone and you decline to market it, you are not being modest. You are withholding. There is a person out there stuck on exactly the thing you understand, who will not find you because you decided that asking for attention was undignified.
My eleven-pageview tutorial helped nobody. Not because it was bad, but because I was too proud to do the second half of the job.
A Business Plan That Actually Works
Everything so far is a set of decisions, and decisions are worth writing down. The problem is that the standard template is designed to hide exactly the decisions that matter. Five-year projections, market sizing, competitive matrices: I have read plenty of these and I have yet to see one that was not fiction with a table of contents.
The structure I use instead has five sections, and its virtue is that it is hard to fake.
Truth. The world as it actually is. The market, the existing needs, who already serves them, what has been tried, what failed and why. No positions and no spin, just ground-level reality, the more specific the better. Most plans skip this because it requires actual knowledge.
Assertions. What you will do to change that. We will do X and Y will happen. We will build Z with this much money in this much time. This is the heart of the document, because the only reason to start anything is to make change happen, and this is where you say what change and how you will know.
Alternatives. Your assertions will be wrong, not all of them but enough. So what then? Which parts flex, which deadlines can slip, which assumptions can be replaced without the whole thing collapsing? A plan without this section is not confident, it is fragile.
People. Not resumes. Who these specific individuals are, what they have done, and what they are likely to do next. Attitude over credentials.
Money. How much, spent on what, arriving from where, at what rate, with what left over when the plan does not go as written.
Notice that four of the five sections are just the earlier psychology written down honestly. Truth is the worldview of the people you serve. Assertions are the tension you intend to create. People and money are the constraints on how long you can keep showing up.
The Magic of Good Enough
One thing has to be true before any plan matters, and it is the thing I most needed to hear.
Perfect closes the door. It asserts you are finished, and worse, it forbids you from trying, because aiming at perfection and missing gets defined as failure. I lost years to this. Perfectionism looks like high standards and often functions as fear in better clothes.
I wrote about this trap at length in Fire Before Aim, and planning is where it does the most damage, because planning is the most respectable way to avoid shipping. Nobody criticizes you for doing more research. You can spend six months refining a business plan and collect nothing but approval for it, right up until the afternoon you notice you have no customers and no evidence. The five sections above are worth writing. They are also worth writing quickly and badly the first time, because a plan you revise after contact with three real readers beats a plan you polished alone for a quarter.
Good enough is not a shortcut. It is a starting position, and it works in a sequence that took me too long to see. Good enough gets engagement. Engagement earns trust. Trust lets you actually see the people you serve. Seeing them lets you learn. Learning lets you make a real promise. A real promise earns enrollment. And enrollment is the only thing that has ever produced better.
Ship it, then improve it. The improvement is not available before the shipping, which means shipping is not the risky part. Waiting is.
Where to Start This Week
- Write down the change you are trying to make, specifically enough to verify whether it happened.
- Write down the smallest number of people for whom that change has to happen for this to be worth your time.
- Write down what those people already believe, want, and fear, in their words rather than yours.
- Find one thing you can give away that would genuinely help them, and publish it.
- Build one direct line to the people it reaches, one you own rather than rent.
- Show up again next week. Then fifty more times.
Every step of that is available to someone with no budget, no team, and no permission from anyone.
The ghostwriter who never claims the profit on her own book is not short on talent. She is short one decision. Not the decision to write, which she has clearly already made, but the decision to do the second half of the job: to find the specific people who need what she makes, tell them a true story about it, and keep showing up until they would notice if she stopped.
I skipped that second half for years and had the pageview numbers to prove it. The work was never the problem.
What is one thing you have made that nobody ever found? Tell me what it was and who you think it was actually for, because in my experience the second question is where the answer hides. I read and reply to every comment.
Want more breakdowns of business books that change how you operate rather than just what you know? Subscribe to the BullishBooks.com newsletter, and if you are building something small on purpose, start with the Lean Startup blueprint for the product side of the same problem.
