I hate that this is true

Capitalism's solution to this "problem" is competition. If your widget sucks, but is cheaper, and mine is more. expensive, but better, then it's up to consumers to differentiate. eg Dyson makes expensive versions of gadgets. Some people see the value, others call them overpriced and then complain when the cheap knockoff sucks. It's -an imperfect system, but the free market is the solution to that problem.

This problem really bothers me as well. I think that ultimately this problem boils down to reducing search cost[0], which the internet has already partially done. I think AI will reduce them further if it is not captured by the advertisement industry for the average user. However, we cannot assume a fully rational customer in the real world. Especially in software, the customer does not know what they are looking for most of the time. Further they cannot evaluate how good your offering is vs competitors without investing a significant amount of time, which in turn increases search cost. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_cost

I think you either need to split your time in between 100% product and 100% marketing or have a founding team that is able to do both - not just “marketing” but the ability to build and leverage a personal + corporate brand and get specific influential people to work with you on social media and for PR. The “build in public” thing sort of works if your customer base is other aspirational founder-developers but also has saturated and become less useful. I think the stakes for what constitute a credible and trustworthy product are higher now that AI has lowered the bar for new entrants to get “something” working; in a way it’s almost discrediting now to market something not-quite-ready because randoms on reddit can just as easily do that, and it signals something very different now than it used to. There’s also a bias towards noticing the noisy advertisers a lot and not how many other star…