This post might mean nothing to many of you, but to me, it means a lot and is proof that you might have all creativity, best service and genuineness but still lavish in failure with your business if there is no quality marketing. No matter what you do, let your product/service be good, but let the marketing be "better," if not "best." Those popular companies are products of good marketing and this marketing is not all about you spending all the money, you can engage people in terms of affiliates and before you know it, it would have gone viral.
What shocked me and even brought about this post was an in-game on Telegram that I joined through a Medium article about 3-4 months ago. The developers had good prospects and gave quality UI & UX etc, but they struggled to sell what they offered for months. They might have tried some nonsense marketing system that gave them about 450k fake followers. I know it's "nonsense" since their posts hardly attracted 700 reactions (like, love etc) for months despite 450k followers with over 100k views.
But in just 3 days of noticing they've partnered with a good advertising outlet, could you believe that the followers jumped to over 1 million with over 750k views and the reaction has reached almost 200k from below 700? This is awesome! This can only happen with the help of "marketing," which I now value more than products and services in a business's success.
This will always be true, everyone starts off small scale and has to build up from the beginning. You might be able to speed that process up by throwing a whole load of money at it or using connections in the industry, but money buys shortcuts in every area of life. It is possible to grow organically in different fields, but you should always be trying to figure out new growth strategies to get more traffic or viewers, if that is your long term plan. The first year can often be the hardest, because you have to keep going with less motivation as the numbers look so small.