Selling more sales (aka marketing) is the ultimate value proposition. Google and FB print money because they call up business and say “Pay us $$ and we’ll give you $$$”.

I wonder how much of it is a zero sum game. Some amount of advertising would induce impulse purchase but surely some of it like marketing for a plumber just causes sales to be redirected to the one who spent the most on marketing rather than actually creating new sales.

Google's business model for the last decade has been to pitch people who want advertising against each other, bidding ever higher for top placements.

It's up to you to decide whether that's a zero-sum game (personally I don't think it is by a strict definition), but Google is certainly responsible for more and more companies allocating an ever growing part of their budget to advertising.

It isn't immediately obvious whether that results in more business. Some of these companies may be spending more and more just to keep the same amount of sales due to bid prices increasing.

This effect is somewhat masked in a vibrant and growing economy, so it's not that easy to distill.

I suppose in theory people only have so much to spend but on the other hand growing the economy grows that disposable income.

What I found was indirect competitors with deep VC funded pockets were bidding rates high enough that it wasn't viable for me. I say indirect as they didn't compete against my product but did bid on the same keywords.

I wonder if there is some upper limit on how much advertisers can extract from the economy before they start to weaken it.

If your plumber's marketing is 'hey I'm plumber mcplungerface, call me' then yes. If your marketing is 'Hey <local high school football team mascot>s, protect your family from black mold! For $249 we'll inspect and treat your sump pump and water conditioning system and guarantee the work for ten years' you'll generate demand.

Plumbers are a bad example: Its hard to find one thats even available around here. Some just say “sorry booked for 3 months”

There’s one not far from me that has taken a more modern approach and now has 20 employees.

Good for them. But thats 20 people who are not working elsewhere and the macro supply/demand ratios are the same.

Maybe people who think about marketing problems, tend to have more marketing knowledge and are better at marketing their own products and are people more likely to post on websites like this promoting their products.

I know I have folders and folders of unmarketed products.

Banks need to do marketing. I get to choose who I bank with!

During a gold rush, sell shovels.

Sell services to shovel sellers.

Sell a NFT shovel, it is 2022!

So you are saying I should build a no-code platform?

A no-code platform with a shovel as the only icon.

He also makes devutils.app which is very 'HN-er' and from his blog looks like it's a good chunk of his ncome!

I don't think it's about marketing. I think it's because it solves an immediate problem or gives people something that they want and as it happens, the opportunities for the folks at HN or Producthunt are in that area because it's not a solved problem unlike things like developer tools, messaging or e-mail.

Think about it, what makes you funny inside? Knowing more about people or sending messages through slightly different UI?

My other product is a developer app, which I also considered successful :) (see my previous Show HN posts)

Maybe a wild guess, but anything thats not related to ads/marketing/analytics etc., are too difficult to monetize by a solo founder ? Or maybe the other areas too difficult to get into not just in terms of software complexity, but in terms of support requirement , availability SLAs etc ?

Vanity (metrics) is a great sales driver.