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You’ve heard it before:

💬 “Marketing is everything!”
💬 “A great product sells itself!”

Both are wrong.

🚫 Great marketing can’t save a bad product. Word spreads, reputations crumble.
🚫 A great product won’t sell itself. If no one knows about it, it doesn’t matter.

In This Edition:

• The truth about why marketing AND product matter (not one or the other).

• How a 5% SaaS conversion rate taught us to rethink onboarding and retention.

• The two lessons that shaped our roadmap—and might shape yours.

Want a shorter version of this?
Check out my LinkedIn post here.

I believe: It’s Marketing AND Product

The best businesses do two things:
1️⃣ Build products that solve real problems.
2️⃣ Market them so effectively they’re irresistible.

Neglect either, and success becomes a gamble.

At Ertiqah, we applied this principle when launching LiGo, our solution for independent consultants on LinkedIn.

We didn’t wait for perfection.

We launched with just 30% of our roadmap features but paired it with focused, relentless marketing.

The result?

✅ 300+ users
✅ Triple-digit MRR
✅ A roadmap guided by user feedback—not assumptions

But, that’s not the most important thing!

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Newsletter continued:

We hit an interesting milestone:

For SaaS, post-trial conversion rates typically range from 5% to 17%.

I actually expected 1%. 
(So hitting 5% was a win).

Here’s What We Learned

1️⃣ Fix onboarding before retention.
We realized 95 out of 100 trial users were dropping off. Building retention features or “moats” made no sense until we solved this.

Instead, we focused on onboarding to help users reach the “aha” moment faster. Excessive handholding? Absolutely. And it worked.

2️⃣ Build incrementally.
Instead of adding “nice-to-haves,” we prioritized improvements that delivered immediate impact. Each sprint became about user success, not feature bloat.

The Takeaway

Build. Market. Help users succeed.

It’s not one or the other. It’s all three.

Here’s to building and marketing great things,
Junaid

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