You could do all this work to get your product into the press. Or you can just make something that people actually care about, and the press will come to you.
Within three months of launch, SproutRobot has been on TechCrunch, LifeHacker, and on CyberGuy on 40 TV stations across the U.S., and we didn't lift a finger for any of it. We just built something people were excited about and the press found us.
It took me about a decade to learn the lesson of eighth grade dances: you can be a wonderfully witty, intelligent, charming gentleman, and if you stand there in the corner waiting for a young lady to recognize this, in all probability you're going to be a very lonely witty, intelligent, charming gentleman.
Aah the great "good engineers don't need marketers" debate. I guess the only point I can really make is, what if you had someone proactively reaching out to others that didn't write about you, but would have if they'd heard about it, since SproutRobot is so awesome? By your train of logic, then, you could've gotten 100x the return on a marketer's efforts, and their job would've been an easy one because they wouldn't have to do any convincing.
I think that's more the exception than the rule. You won't even have good SERP rankings early on if you don't do any marketing. The awesomeness of a product generally cannot flow through the tubes and into a writer's brain — he needs to know about it.
Within three months of launch, SproutRobot has been on TechCrunch, LifeHacker, and on CyberGuy on 40 TV stations across the U.S., and we didn't lift a finger for any of it. We just built something people were excited about and the press found us.