October 16, 2025
Under-marketing
Many profitable SMEs with great products struggle to achieve significant growth. This post introduces the concept of 'under-marketing' and explores why businesses with product-market fit often fail to expand due to a lack of effective marketing efforts.
TLDR;
Most SME business owners I speak to keep saying how their entire time is spent working 'in' the business and not 'on' the business. Their customers keep raving about their product but they still struggle to grow their business. I have realized this phenomenon as under-marketing their business. And this is usually due to lack of nuanced know how on what's under marketing.
Here is the long form -
Most SMEs that exist over a few years in business ( typically ~3 years+ ) in existence are usually profitable and have a good product aka have found product market fit. But most of these SMEs don't really show high growth in revenue (let's say ~10%+ y-o-y). This is usually due to not marketing their product / offering well.
TBC