Part One: Strategy · How it is understood
It is easiest to promote a product where promotion is sold. A person with a problem goes looking in particular places: a colleague, a search, a forum, a marketplace.
People half-look for months before they search in earnest. They notice what a neighbor uses, or a name at the bottom of an invoice. Then the old way breaks, and for a few days they act. What they do is specific to the kind of person and the kind of problem. A developer searches the error message. A restaurant owner asks another restaurant owner. Someone already living inside a big platform looks in its app directory and nowhere else.
Wherever that place is, the product either turns up there or is never considered. A better product that is absent loses to a worse one that is present, because the person stops looking as soon as something plausible appears.
Companies tend to market where it is convenient. Advertising can be bought this afternoon and reported on by Friday. Being the answer a trusted colleague gives takes years and cannot be bought at all. So budgets go to the first, and the places where people really look are left to chance.
Those places also tell you what to build. If people ask an adviser, the adviser needs a reason to recommend you and a way to work with you. If they search, the page they land on must answer the question they typed. Xero built a program and tools for accountants, because small businesses ask their accountant which accounting software to use, and those advisers brought their clients with them.
Some products are noticed through use. Every Calendly invitation puts the product in front of the person invited, who picks a time on a Calendly page. If your product makes something that gets sent to other people, a document, a booking link, a request for payment, that thing is the introduction.
Therefore:
Learn where your customers notice products while they put up with the old way, and where they turn when it breaks: who they ask, what they type. Be present and useful in those few places first.
In practice. Ask your last ten customers: "What was the very first thing you did when you decided to fix this?" Tally the answers. Then check whether you can be found in the top two.
Goes with. The looking begins at THE STRUGGLING MOMENT (1), and people search in THEIR WORDS, NOT YOURS (10). When they arrive, the page must SAY WHAT IT'S FOR (30).