You can't out-market a bad product to grow.
When thinking about marketing your product you need to make sure what you're selling is valuable. Your product needs to actually deliver its promises.
I am currently thinking of a way to better market one of my product, CariKabel.com, and the best way to do marketing is to show proof that your product do indeed helps people achieve their goals.
But CariKabel has yet to have any success stories that I can use for my marketing.
That is when I realized I'm not comfortable just selling a "dream".
A dream is what it can do vs what it has achieved – it's not tangible.
Yes, you could get sales selling a bad product and have some "success", but I don't think it's sustainable.
You probably should be thinking about your product's impact on your customers if you want a sustainable business.
CariKabel's main goal is to help job seekers have a better job-hunting experience vs the traditional way by giving you access to the referrer's email of the people in the company that you're interested in.
For example, if you want to work for Hashnode.
You would probably have a higher chance of getting called for an interview being referred by someone working there vs applying directly through their job portal.
At least that's the idea – that's CariKabel's "dream".
But until I can prove that is what's happening, it's really hard for me to spend more time and money marketing it without any success stories.
Plus I'll feel a lot better selling stuff that helps people. I won't be thinking about weird marketing tactics to get customers to compensate for a bad product.
However, you can't get any success stories without customers. So you'll still need marketing to start.
But after getting your first few customers, the next step is to get testimonies.
Then you can think about scaling.
I mean it makes more sense that way:
Get the first few customers
See if they achieve what you're promising using your product
If yes, you can use their stories/testimonies to reach more people
If not then maybe your product does not make sense, or you need to change something about it
So yeah, that is why I said you can't out-market a bad product. You'll eventually fail even if it seems you're doing great (i.e. sales are high in the beginning).