DHH and Jason Fried are masters of marketing. Marketing != paid ads. They are great storytellers and have been doing it consistently for the past 20 years with blogs, books and podcasts. The story they built around their products also serves a culture and philosophy of people using their products, and telling other people about it.

In every big company I've worked for marketing is distinct from sales. Marketing is about lead generation, sales is about lead conversion.

If you want to sell into enterprise then you are going to need sales people and hence an expensive product that covers that cost. Those big deals need a lot of hand holding to go through.

There are plenty of counter examples though, where marketing is doing most of the work and the offering is mostly self service. Signing up for a $25/month Saas is never going to warrant a visit from a salesperson.

Of course sales is different from marketing. I was responding to the parent who said that Tailwind and Basecamp didn't do paid ads.

I dunno. I hear that a lot but whenever I'm working on a project with a client who uses Basecamp, it takes a good few seconds for me to remember that the URL I need to trigger autocomplete is "launchpad.37signals.com". Having your product name in the URL seems like Marketing 101 to me.