If you know marketing, you don't need VCs (unless you are in a capital-intensive business like rocket building). The problem is that most people who get funded are technical and do not know marketing and growing organically. However, there are lots of businesses that grow extremely well simply due to the cofounders having previous experience with marketing, often in a professional capacity.
My go-to example is Lemlist (and their "Lempire" of related products). The founders built their own cold email agency, grew that to millions just through sheer labor, then built software to automate that process and now they're at a 200 million dollar valuation from more than 10 to 15 million dollars in annual recurring revenue. They have lots of marketing channels: organic SEO via content marketing, Facebook group with frequent events like interviews with other agency owners and salespeople, YouTube videos that are then recut and repurposed to TikTok/Instagram/Facebook videos, partnering with influencers, paid advertising, and of course, cold messaging other salespeople and agencies via LinkedIn and email. Most technical founders do not know or have the patience to do any of this. If they do, though, they could similarly grow to such an ARR in a few short years, as Lemlist started only in 2018. Similar examples include GoHighLevel and ClickFunnels which are almost at or over a 1 billion dollar valuation each, both bootstrapped. The ClickFunnels founder for example sold his software via live demos (both webinars and in person events) where you got X% off but only if you booked right at the end of the demo, which apparently drove quite a high percentage of their initial sales.
I'd highly advise founders to start a marketing agency if only to understand marketing in a real capacity and how to deliver results to paying clients. I have done so via a cold email and paid ads agency for various niches before and I believe it's helped me immensely with future products. Best of all, you learn to be truly aligned with your customers and providing them direct value because they are paying you every month. If you make a mistake, you must fix it, you have no backup fund of venture capital previously raised in order to skate BY, especially now that ZIRP (zero-interest-rate phenomenon) is over.
I'm not dismissive of businesses like Lemlist, but would propose another angle.
I find that businesses that are spin out from agency models are particular, inherit a strong characteristic and outlook similar to agencies. This is not a critique of their model per say, but an observation that leads me to be hesitant to take advice from agency-born models and apply to more typical product-focused B2B or B2C settings.
This leads me also to note that that the nature of content exposes us to a lot of people who believe in posting content. I'm not against it, but would like to fight the common urge towards content as the best strategy to go to market. However, given that the medium is message, we don't hear from people who don't need to post to do business.
True, most agency companies may make money but their products definitely have quite a lot of room for improvement, since the founders are not engineers by trade and thus there is no permeation of engineering culture as in other tech companies. However, I will say that it would be good for tech people to learn the marketing side if only by doing it semi-professionally for a client, just to see what goes into it. Then, they can choose to bootstrap or go the VC route, not necessarily create a whole new agency from scratch and continuously work on that. It's simply a learning method, one where you conveniently get paid to do so.
Yes, I don't think content is the only way, and I don't believe most of their growth was from content, anyway. It seems like it was just sending out lots of messages to people and hoping they're interested. Content marketing is a secondary mechanism, it is inefficient to get you your first customers, and it is definitely not the best go to market strategy as you say.
Can you please expand on the topic of "learn the marketing side if only by doing it semi-professionally for a client"?
I mean, one side of this spectrum is doing affiliate marketing or direct-sales/MLM. Other point on this spectrum might be for an engineer to go get hired as a social media "manager" (lots of "jobs" like this on Upwork).
My go-to example is Lemlist (and their "Lempire" of related products). The founders built their own cold email agency, grew that to millions just through sheer labor, then built software to automate that process and now they're at a 200 million dollar valuation from more than 10 to 15 million dollars in annual recurring revenue. They have lots of marketing channels: organic SEO via content marketing, Facebook group with frequent events like interviews with other agency owners and salespeople, YouTube videos that are then recut and repurposed to TikTok/Instagram/Facebook videos, partnering with influencers, paid advertising, and of course, cold messaging other salespeople and agencies via LinkedIn and email. Most technical founders do not know or have the patience to do any of this. If they do, though, they could similarly grow to such an ARR in a few short years, as Lemlist started only in 2018. Similar examples include GoHighLevel and ClickFunnels which are almost at or over a 1 billion dollar valuation each, both bootstrapped. The ClickFunnels founder for example sold his software via live demos (both webinars and in person events) where you got X% off but only if you booked right at the end of the demo, which apparently drove quite a high percentage of their initial sales.
I'd highly advise founders to start a marketing agency if only to understand marketing in a real capacity and how to deliver results to paying clients. I have done so via a cold email and paid ads agency for various niches before and I believe it's helped me immensely with future products. Best of all, you learn to be truly aligned with your customers and providing them direct value because they are paying you every month. If you make a mistake, you must fix it, you have no backup fund of venture capital previously raised in order to skate BY, especially now that ZIRP (zero-interest-rate phenomenon) is over.