12 May 2026 · business · marketing

Marketing is the work

Brent Roose says PHP's biggest problem is marketing, not the tech. The same is true of almost every business that's quietly good at what it does.

Two identical timber market stalls side by side on a wet cobbled night-market street. The left stall is bare and unannounced: no signage, no banners, a single vendor standing alone behind the counter with arms folded, no customers anywhere near the goods laid out in neat rows. The right stall is the same construction but transformed by attention: a huge backlit signboard glows cyan-to-mint above it, cyan-edged bunting strung across its frame, festoon lights along the eaves, and a thick crowd of silhouetted customers presses against the counter as the vendor leans forward to serve them. A single small magenta paper lantern glows faintly in the upper-right deep distance.

Brent Roose has a piece on PHP’s biggest problem, and it isn’t what you’d expect from a longtime voice in the PHP ecosystem. PHP’s runtime is fast, the ecosystem is healthy, the tooling has caught up with everywhere else, and Laravel is genuinely one of the best frameworks in any language. None of that is the problem. The problem, he argues, is that PHP has no real marketing arm, no full-time documentation team, no funded conference circuit, no coordinated voice on social media, and the result is that a perfectly good language reads as a punchline to people who’ve never written a line of it.

He’s right, and the part that should make every founder uncomfortable is that this isn’t really a story about PHP. It’s a story about almost every business that quietly does excellent work and then can’t understand why nobody seems to know they exist.

None of this is new. Back when I worked in digital marketing, the line we’d lead every SEO and PPC pitch with was “what’s the point in having a website if nobody knows it’s there?”, and it worked because it was true. Most clients had been so busy getting the website built that they’d forgotten visibility was a separate job.

I see this constantly with the companies I advise. The product is solid, the engineering is honest, the pricing is fair, the customers who do find them are loyal and renew without thinking about it. And the founders sit there genuinely puzzled that growth is slower than it should be, because surely the work should speak for itself. The work does not speak for itself. It never has, and it especially doesn’t now, when there’s roughly an infinite supply of plausible-looking competitors generating content at a rate no honest team can match.

Technical founders especially treat marketing as a tax on the real work, something you’ll get to once the product is finished or the codebase is clean or the next feature is out. The marketing budget is whatever’s left over, the docs site is whatever you had time for last quarter, the social presence is whichever cofounder happened to enjoy Twitter, and the case studies are perpetually three weeks away from being written. None of that is a strategy, it’s a series of postponements dressed up as priorities, and the gap between you and the louder competitor compounds while you’re shipping.

Perception, in other words, is part of the product. If the people who’d benefit from your work don’t know it exists, or have an outdated impression of it, or can’t find a clear story about what you do and why, then the work isn’t really finished, regardless of how good the code is or how cleanly the operations run. You have to fund the storytelling the same way you fund the engineering. Hire for it, ringfence the budget, treat the docs and the conference talks and the long-form writing as load-bearing rather than optional, and accept that being good at what you do is the entry ticket and not the prize.

The companies that win the next decade aren’t going to be the ones with the best technology, because the gap on technology is narrower than it’s ever been. They’re going to be the ones who decided that telling the story properly was part of the job, and budgeted accordingly.