The uncomfortable truth about why 'Build It And They Will Come' is a lie that kills startups.
You have committed a cardinal sin. You have fallen in love with your product.
You’ve built a marvel of engineering. The architecture is clean, the latency is low, and the codebase is a work of art. Yet, your Stripe dashboard reads $0. This is the classic tragedy of the technical founder: believing that product excellence generates its own distribution.
The Field of Dreams Fallacy
Most engineers operate under the delusion that if they build it, users will come. In 2025, this is mathematically impossible. The noise-to-signal ratio on the internet is deafening. "Good" products die in silence every single day.
"First-time founders are obsessed with product. Second-time founders are obsessed with distribution."
The solution isn't to write more code. The solution is to treat attention engineering with the same rigor you treat software engineering.
1. Stop Speaking "Dev"
Your landing page says "We use an event-driven architecture with Kafka streams." Your customer wants to know "Does this stop my app from crashing during Black Friday?" Nobody buys features. They buy outcomes. They buy sleep. They buy status.
2. The Invisible Funnel
You need to be present where decisions are made. This means LinkedIn, X (Twitter), and niche communities. You can't outsource your voice, but you can systemize it. If you are not publishing, you do not exist.