Marketing can be a lot of different things.

I brought on a high-touch salesperson on spec years ago and it did not work out. He and I were really successful at getting audiences with people but we never made the sales we were looking for and, worse, he lost me small cheap jobs that I could have sold myself. He'd probably say it was a product problem and he might have been right but later on I found out I wasn't the only person who had the same experience with him.

For some products you need those kind of skills. I've met people like him who really are worth their weight in gold.

For other products you need somebody who can make an Adwords campaign, analyzes the analytics, refine it and repeat. That kind of person can be worth their weight in gold too.

For this conversation to be productive you have to have some idea if you need one or the other or a bit of both.

You take off your solo technical founder pants and put on your solo marketing founder hat.

In business, selling is much much much more important than making because if you have money you can hire technical workers. But nobody will care nearly as much about survival as you.

And if you have a technical background you are much more likely to have technical people in your network. Good luck.

Jobs and Wozniak proved (at least in the 70s) that a great technical founder could team up with a brilliant marketer and build a huge company from next to nothing.

I seriously wonder if that can happen today. As a technical founder, I have tried to find a marketing partner for years. Every time it has failed miserably as each one proved unable to move the needle.

In my case, it could be the product, but I wonder who has seen success in this day and age.

You seem to have missed the key step. Talk to customers before you build. Build what they need. Then have them talk to you to adjust things until you really nailed down the product that solves their needs, and then have them talk to their friends about how much you rock.

Marketing comes later.

On one particular project I started by "spamming" relevant interest based forums. Luckily I was a member of said forums for quite a while before I have released my first version. It was about 13 years ago. Strategy had worked and then I got CEO as a partner along with some investment so I no longer had to do it

I've always relied on Google Ads and eventually SEO for my SaaS products. For SEO, I've had good success with having the landing page be an unauthenticated version of the app itself (modified to include SEO friendly text), allowing the users to immediately start using a limited version of the app which eventually prompts for signup. After signup, any data from the landing page shell gets pushed into their account.

This significantly reduces bounce rate compared to a traditional landing page and I've had good success getting to the top of popular search terms after a few months/years.

Honestly, this is what keeps me from really going for it and self-identifying as a founder.

I can build nearly any system to support nearly any idea, and I have done so many times. When it comes to outreach, marketing, the kind of network building, the audience building, and then the face-to-face aspects of promoting what you've built and selling (grifting) potential customers, it is a very different skill set.

I have almost always just allowed other people in my world that are far better than that to take the reins in those roles. I think having a complementary co-founder who operates naturally in that space is, in many cases, necessary.

Small anecdote: I had a quick call with a founder the other day, and when I mentioned to him the work I was doing for an organization he was familiar with, I mentioned having used my technical ability to help the organization secure a lucrative contract. I found it very surprising that his response was, "Well, why didn't you just go interact with the customer directly and take the job yourself?" I thought that that was a curious mentality– stuff like that doesn't cross my mind, because I don't have any, nor do I enjoy any, of the soft skills that are required to operate in that world. There are a wide variety of personalities, and the types of problems that engage different people are just as diverse.