Which One Is More Important? The Product or Marketing?

It is more important to learn why most people fail than it is to learn why certain people succeed.
In r/startup, there is a never-ending rant about how a person spent months building a product, and yet nobody showed up and nobody cared about their little SaaS. As someone who tries to do the same, here are my two cents, and I hope it can later help me as a reference for my current thoughts to see what I will think differently in the future.

Their product solves nobody's problem

Yes, I want to say that—it solves nobody’s problem. Of course no one is going to care.
In my current job, the founder created a company with minimal investors, from $0 to today over half a billion dollars in revenue, starting from 2010 to today, with just shy of 300 employees. He started a product that "sucks," as we would describe it today. However, people cared. It was something that did not echo into the void—he got a response. It was exactly the product that he, as a developer at that time, needed. I would say that's the dream of every solopreneur.

Time's different now, and your product sucks

Despite my previous example, I would say that times are different now.
The SaaS field is like the beverage market now—we're close to running out of vacant markets, and the low-hanging fruits are long gone. People are competing with new tastes, more tiny, smaller, finely grained markets. You need to think about your competitors now—they are usually better, faster, and more resourceful compared to you, the solopreneur. A half-assed MVP may have some advantages, comparatively speaking, but why would people choose you over some better-developed and maintained services?

It's either:

1. You offer something that solves the same/similar problem but in a completely different manner, or
2. You solve a problem that's small enough that no one really cared before.

Imagine if DuckDuckGo had started in 1998—would they need to focus so much on privacy? Wouldn't they be 100 times bigger compared to now?

Idea is important, but only the good one matters

Again, a common phrase I hear is that "idea is not important, execution matters."
I used to think so, and I agree—execution matters.
But idea is important. Don’t tell me that your “yet another to-do app” will have more potential than Motion.ai. Don’t tell me Helix (or any other non-AI editor today) will have more commercial success than Cursor or Windsurf.
Idea matters. Good ideas matter.

I would say that:
$success = idea × (execution - C)^x,
where there's some exponential relationship between execution and success, and C is some threshold of execution that you must reach before you see any success. And yes, idea matters!

Conclusion

I realized I haven’t yet talked about marketing—which will go into the next blog (when I have more experience about it).
I believe what I have now is a good idea. I believe that I solved an old problem in a new way. I'm still growing my execution. Let's see how it turns out in a few months, after it passes that threshold.