The Essence of Business: Have the Goods, Know How to Shout

Boiling Water and Throwing Rocks

Someone once told me: the essence of human technology is boiling water and throwing rocks.

Think about it—they’re right.

A bow and arrow is throwing a rock. A cannon is throwing a bigger rock. A missile is throwing an even bigger rock, even further. A steam engine is boiling water. A thermal power plant is boiling bigger water. A nuclear power plant is still basically boiling water—just using nuclear reactions to heat it up.

Thousands of years of technological progress, and it all comes down to doing these two things at increasingly extreme scales.

So What’s the Essence of Business?

Following the same logic, business is actually pretty simple too: have the goods, know how to shout.

The goods are your product. Knowing how to shout means attracting traffic.

You need both. Great goods without shouting? Even the best wine fears a deep alley. Great shouting without goods? That’s just fraud.

The Vegetable Vendor Lesson

If you grew up in China, you’ve probably heard those classic comedy routines about how street vendors hawk their wares.

Picture a vegetable seller: your produce is the freshest, your prices the lowest, but you just squat there in silence. Customers walk right past without a glance. Meanwhile, the vendor next to you—worse vegetables, higher prices—is belting out: “Come, come, come! Today’s cucumbers, fresh off the vine, sweet or your money back!” And all the customers flock over.

This isn’t some sophisticated business theory. It’s the most basic common sense. You have to let people know you’re selling something, and make them feel it’s worth buying.

Thousands of years, and this fundamental logic has never changed.

The Golden Decade of Storefronts

About ten to fifteen years ago, investing in commercial real estate was all the rage. “One good storefront feeds three generations” was the mantra.

What’s a storefront, fundamentally? It’s a way to capture physical traffic.

Open a shop on a pedestrian street, and tens of thousands of people naturally walk past your door every day. Open one at a residential complex entrance, and thousands of residents pass by daily. That foot traffic is your traffic source. Better location, more traffic, easier business.

That’s why storefront prices kept climbing for years—people were essentially paying for “physical world traffic entry points.”

The Great Traffic Migration

But things are different now.

People’s attention has shifted from offline to online. Window shopping used to be the main way to kill time; now it’s scrolling your phone. You used to have to walk up to a store to discover a new product; now you see a short video and place an order.

Traffic has migrated from the physical world to the digital world.

That’s why brick-and-mortar storefronts have been losing value while “traffic” has become the most valuable commodity of the internet age. Fundamentally, buying ad placement on TikTok, buying Google ads, or doing influencer seeding on social platforms is the same thing as paying top dollar for a prime storefront location fifteen years ago—you’re paying for traffic.

The medium changed—from concrete and steel to fiber optics and screens. The logic didn’t.

Back to Indie Developers

Understanding this makes the indie developer’s situation crystal clear.

In the AI era, “having the goods” has become unprecedentedly easy. Cursor, Claude Code, and various AI tools let one person build what used to require a whole team. The goods problem is largely solved.

But “knowing how to shout”—AI can’t help you much with that.

You have to figure out: Where are my users? What platforms do they browse? What keywords do they search? What topics do they care about? How do I stop them in their tracks with a single sentence about my product?

That’s why the developer I mentioned in yesterday’s post—solid product, less than $1,000 in a year of revenue. He had the goods, but hadn’t learned how to shout.

The Real Challenge for Super-Individuals

Everyone’s talking about “super-individuals” and “one-person companies” now. AI has genuinely made this possible—one person can handle product development, design, and operations.

But the biggest bottleneck for a one-person company is precisely the part that seems the least “technical”: getting users to see you.

You can write great code by yourself, but it’s hard to simultaneously handle content creation, SEO optimization, social media management, community building, user feedback collection… Each of these requires time, sustained effort, and different skill sets.

This is reality. Technology has dropped the barrier to “having goods” to the floor, but the barrier to “knowing how to shout” is actually rising—because everyone’s shouting online now, the noise is getting louder, and your voice is getting harder to hear.

So What Do We Do?

I don’t have a definitive answer, but a few things are becoming clearer:

1. Learn to shout before stocking up. Most people (myself included) think: build the product first, figure out marketing later. But maybe it should be the other way around—build your audience and influence first, then create products based on their needs. Master the shouting first, then get the goods.

2. Find your “storefront.” Physical storefronts are fixed-location traffic entry points. Your internet “storefront” could be your blog, your Twitter account, your YouTube channel, or a community where you’re active. Find a platform where you can consistently produce content, and cultivate it.

3. Shouting is a skill—practice it. Writing copy, making videos, storytelling—these aren’t innate talents. They’re learnable skills. Just like when you first started coding: terrible at first, but you got better with practice.

4. Accept this fact: shouting might matter more than the goods. For people from technical backgrounds, this is hard to swallow. But the market doesn’t pay you for beautiful code. The market cares about one thing: how many people know you, trust you, and are willing to pay for your product.

In Closing

The essence of business hasn’t changed in thousands of years. From street markets to the internet, from storefronts to traffic, the form changes but the fundamental equation stays the same:

Great product × Being seen = Making money

Both factors are indispensable, and it’s multiplication—if either one is zero, the result is zero.

Those of us from technical backgrounds have spent too much time polishing the thing on the left side of that multiplication sign, while neglecting the equally important variable on the right.

It’s time to learn how to shout.