Long-time blog readers know of my passion for Perpetual Beta.

It’s basically the idea that you are fully aware that your product/service isn’t perfect, communicate that to your audience, use the feedback to iterate, and accept the fact that there will be hiccups as a result.

Well, now, at least as it relates to engineering products (and heck, I’ll extend to CDM as well, since that’s sort of a social engineering product, right?) comes the Grabowski Ratio (courtesy of Raving Fan, Venkatesh).

So, what does Grabowski tell us?

In short, you are better off investing as much in marketing as you do in “product development” to increase the likelihood of commercial success.

And this is not just promotion, it’s research, it’s feedback cycles, it’s analysis, it’s making the product itself “Remarkable” and WOM-worthy (WOM: Word-of-Mouth.)

Investment isn’t just money, of course, it’s your time.

If you’re building a product (and these days, products takes all types of forms, of course), continually invest in marketing. In understanding your customer. In studying the competitors.

I guess Dr. Grabowski would just as soon say, “Never Stop Marketing” if you want to increase your odds.

Too much of a stretch there?

Anyway, for the full IEEE peer-reviewed paper by Dr. Grabowski on his work, here you go.