No one wants to be sold, but everyone wants to buy.

At an event I attended this week someone from the audience asked a presenter about how much they thought marketing affected the success of tech startups.  After a pregnant pause the co-presenter responded, “I think he just threw up in his mouth.”  To which the first presenter responded accurately,  ”If your product sucks, no amount of marketing will help you.”

Yes, and if your product is awesome there are always three primary marketing needs that the founders usually aren’t experienced in; because instead, they’re probably experienced in creating the product they passionately made for the world.  1) Finding the people who love what you have to offer. 2) Reaching them by communicating what’s in it for them to check out your product and 3) Making them feel special.

Many times it seems that marketing (connecting) is undervalued or devalued as much less important than creating and executing a product idea.  I invite you to see marketing as the creative execution of connecting great products to great people rather than a necessary evil of doing business.

Businesses are successful when they are executing effectively on both creating great products and creating great relationships with people who want those products.  Businesses that fail often create products they think people want without even asking their target audience what those people want, and creating those products first.

Bad apples and bad experiences have led many people to associate marketing with snake oil salesmen and hyping worthless products.  This definitely exists, but that’s the dark side of the marketing force (think of Darth Vader marketing to Luke to come over to the dark side).  On the bright side of the marketing force, marketing for me has always been about connecting the people who care about specific interests (mobile apps, technology, natural products, great restaurants, gardening, cuff links, motorcycles, clothes, …whatever) to the latest and greatest products and services related to those interests.

Everyone loves to connect and be validated.  Everyone loves to be turned onto products and services they think are valuable.  Certain people love to be the early adopters and be the first ones to both learn about new products and to be the one to tell their friends about it.

Whether you read about it on Twitter or Facebook, stumble on a YouTube video, hear about it from your friends, or see it on a Superbowl TV ad, you learn about everything new from being on the receiving end of marketing.  And then there’s the question of whether every person on the planet over the age of 5 is a marketer since we all tell people about what we think is cool.

In summary, don’t be a marketing hater.  You’re an amateur marketer if you’ve ever recommended a movie, book, iPhone app, hiking trail, vacation spot, gift idea, car model, fishing spot, or anything else to another person.  ”Marketer” isn’t a dirty word.  Some of us are passionate connectors that love helping out companies run by people who have other talents and don’t know how to find, connect and effectively communicate with the people who will love what they created.

What’s your take on the good and evil of marketing / connecting buyers and sellers / communicating product benefits to the public?

Startup Weekend is a conference bringing together developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.  Sounds cool, right?  It is.

The concept grew from an idea by  Andrew Hyde in 2007 and now there have been over 49 Startup Weekends with 65 cities and 11 countries signed on to host more.

Rather than your typical conference of watching speakers and panels, these conferences are designed to facilitate learning through organically forming teams and getting into immediate action.  It’s a conference with some unconference elements that facilitate cumulative collaboration creating community and companies.

It kicks off with all the participants sharing their backgrounds and answering the question, “What’s your problem?”  Over the years I’ve discovered what a crucial question this is to ask for any business or proposed project, product or service.

A classic mistake most entrepreneurs and companies make is that they get excited about an idea and invest valuable time and money into creating a product or service they think is great.  Then they take it to market and try to convince the public to be interested in it.  This is why so many of them fail.  If people aren’t interested in what you’re offering then you don’t have a business.

It’s much more effective to ask people what they want and provide that.  Or even better, ask them what problems they currently have and provide simple and powerful solutions to those problems.  That’s where the sweet spot of helping people and making a profit lie.

Jason Janelle, Tom Markiewicz & Harry Love build an internal media sharing solution; Ron Bronson makes a Twitter-based baseball application; Neil Simon creates WordPress Plugins

In the case of this Startup Weekend, after identifying problems we all broke into teams to immediately start building the solutions.  Through conversations covering design, development and marketing things moved very quickly.

Within the first 3 hours of meeting this morning one product was a ‘fast fail’ (Rosetta Stone already has a similar version of how to connect people who want to practice their second languages with people of equal levels of skill), and a name and WordPress Plugin were created for SpotGrab – a product to connect renters with available apartments.  And that’s just what happened for two of the projects.

Though products, projects and companies are birthed at Startup Weekends, the first focus is on community.  Regardless of any outcome, the conference provides an environment for internet creatives to meet and share their skills with one another.

About a month ago I volunteered to help with business development, marketing and PR for iVolunteer which is a product born from the last Boulder Startup Weekend.

We’re developing a website, iPhone app and WordPress plugin that enables you to find local volunteer opportunities aligned with your interests easily anywhere.  There are over 30 volunteers working on this.  Most of us found out about it after two guys met at the last Boulder Startup Weekend and saw an unfulfilled need.

I’m wondering how similar conferences can be created outside of the tech world to generate collaboration and community.  The registration fee goes entirely to the food budget and the space rental (unless it’s donated like it was this weekend.)  Aside from this, participants are welcome to drop in and out as their schedules demand.  This makes it easy for people to contribute in whatever ways work for them.

How could you create an event like this in your community based around your interests to share your influence and bring people together in fun and productive ways?  Or an easier way to look at it is, ‘What’s your problem?’  Just asking.