“The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.” ― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Marketing and engineering are sometimes seen as polar opposites, which may be true to some. But if they are wielded intelligently together, they can complement each other like no other – and have a magical impact.
Marketing and Engineering Fuses Media and Code
I’m not a Naval fanboy like others, but he has a pretty epic Tweet thread from 2018 that’s made its rounds, and it perfectly describes the power of using media and code, in a way that marketing and engineering leverage the best parts of their disclipines for – wait for it – leverage.
The quote is:
“Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.” – Naval on X, May 31, 2018
What I think is so powerful about this combination is the truth of it. Media – which is advertising, content, social posts, shorts, now AI tools – can be infinitely leverageable. However, the Power Laws apply greatly here. Only a few pieces of media will truly go viral, and only the top 1-10% of production will take 80-90%+ of the gains.
Naval continues:
“An army of robots is freely available – it’s just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.”
With AI, this is more important than ever, and there’s more leverage than ever. Anyone with a Claude Code Max subscription, ChatGPT Pro, Lovable, Replit, Cursor or any other too stack can create some awesome media, content, and code that’s never been leveragable before.
And just to finish the Naval series he says:
“If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.”
There will always be a new hot medium, but the Lindy Effect applies – now you must think about AI distribution, Instagram Reels, and all the old stuff like webinars, podcasts, books and blogs.
For totally non-technical marketers, if you produce a huge amount of really great content at a good speed, it can be more scalable than what mode coders and engineers see with their work. It’s complex.
Why Engineers Need Marketers
It’s likely true what Paul Graham says, that non-technical founders need a technical co-founders, but technical founders don’t need a non-technical cofounder.
This is true in the life of early stage startups, but at a cetain maturity level, companies need a higher level strategist. Mark Zuckerberg needed Sheryl Sandberg, the Google founders needed Eric Schmidt. A core discipline of marketing is market selection – and this ties in deeply with the business strategy.
Marketing is a high-level discipline. There’s a lot of vagueness on what marketing is to the masses, but those with real mature company experience understand the killer advantages of having product positioning and market selection down pat.
Conclusion
Some of the best marketers think like engineers and design beautiful marketing and creative systems that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
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