Why Good Products Stay Unknown

In US factory data on products like concrete, bread and ice, the new plants were as efficient as the old ones. Yet at the same price, a new plant would sell only about 41% of what a plant over 15 years old sold. Even plants 10 to 14 years old were still about a third behind.

That is from Lucia Foster, John Haltiwanger and Chad Syverson, in 2016. The new plants were building just as well. What they did not have yet was the customers.

We started Karos on one belief: being good at your work and being able to tell the world about it are two different skills. We did not come up with that on our own. A lot of people researched it before us. We keep what we read in the Library. Here is the short version.

Being first does not win

Everybody believed that the first company into a market keeps it. In 1993, Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis went back into the archives to check who had really been first.

Almost half of the first sellers had failed: 47% of the 36 they could track. The companies that led each market in its early growth came in about thirteen years after the first seller, on average.

So being the first one to build it is not what wins. Building the market is.

Attention builds on itself

Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds and Duncan Watts gave 48 songs nobody knew to 14,341 people. Some could see what everybody else was downloading, and some could not. When people could see the downloads, the winners got much bigger and much harder to predict. The same song could be a hit in one world and nowhere in another.

Then Arnout van de Rijt and his co-authors gave a small first donation to Kickstarter projects picked at random. 70% of the projects they backed went on to get at least one more donation, against 39% of the others.

The first bit of support brings the next one. Getting those first people is the hardest part, and it is the part that counts.

When people are busy, they read the name

At the body that writes the internet's standards, staff sometimes replaced the author list with et al when they were busy. That hid some well-known names by accident. Timothy Simcoe and David Waguespack found that hiding a working-group chair's name removed about three quarters of that chair's advantage in getting a proposal published.

Investors work the same way. Paul Gompers and his co-authors asked 885 venture capitalists where their deals came from. Only about one deal in ten that they funded came in from the founders themselves. The rest came from their own network, from other investors, or from companies they went looking for.

If you are outside the network, most of the people that could back you never see you.

When buyers can find you, the best work wins

This is the part that gives us hope. In Kerala, fishermen used to buy their boat from the builder in their own village. Then mobile phones arrived, they sold fish in other markets and heard about other builders. Robert Jensen and Nolan Miller show what happened next: the builders whose boats lasted the longest got the customers and grew, and more than half of the weaker builders closed.

And selling can be learned. Stephen Anderson, Rajesh Chandy and Bilal Zia split 852 small businesses in Cape Town at random. A year later, the owners trained in marketing reported 61% more profit than the ones that got nothing. Finance training helped too, by 41%, and the two results are too close to tell apart. So selling is a skill you can add, not the only one.

What the research does not say

Luck still counts. Ability still counts. In the song study, the best songs rarely did badly. And if the work is weak, telling the story well is not going to save it. We keep those studies on the same shelves to stay honest.

But the pattern holds across factories, songs, standards, boats and shops. The work is the first half. Being found is the second half. Most builders only ever get help with the first.

What we do about it

Karos is for people who build things and have no marketing team. It reads your business first: your site, your socials, your competitors and how AI answers describe you. It looks for what is original in your work, what you do that others in your market do not say. Then it plans a campaign around one goal and drafts your posts every day.

Nothing goes out until you approve it. If you are a solo builder or a SaaS founder, those pages show what a first campaign looks like.

Every study above has its caveat written next to it in the Library. Read them. Then go and show your work to people who do not know you yet.