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).
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.