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Is it a marketing problem or a product problem?

By Uri Einav, former CMO and two-time CEO · 6 October 2026

You have hired two marketers in eighteen months. Sales have not moved. The board is asking pointed questions, and you are starting to think the honest answer is that the product is not good enough.

Maybe. But you are standing in front of a smoke alarm going off at three in the morning, and you have decided it is a house fire without checking whether it is burnt toast, or a dead battery in the alarm itself.

Marketing, product, and a broken measurement layer all produce the exact same symptom: traffic goes in, revenue stays flat. Most founders argue about the first two and never check the third.

Why all three look identical from the top of the funnel

From where a founder sits, the view is a number: spend went up, revenue did not. That single fact is consistent with a marketing problem (the wrong people, the wrong message), a product problem (people arrive and do not get it), and a measurement problem (people are converting and you cannot see it, so you are optimizing toward the wrong thing).

You cannot tell these apart by looking at the top-line result. You can only tell them apart by walking the path from a click to a dollar and finding where it breaks. Skip that walk and you will pick the explanation that matches your current mood. After two failed hires, that explanation is usually "the product."

The offering is the popular answer because it is the flattering one

There is a school of thought that says the problem is almost always the offering. Sometimes it is. But "fix the offering" is the most expensive answer on the menu, it takes months, and it is nearly impossible to disprove, which is exactly why it gets chosen before the cheaper explanations have been ruled out.

A wellness subscription app once asked me to scale their paid spend. The diagnostic never got to the ad account. The thing that actually moved revenue was in the product: referrals and reward-based features, a growth engine the app did not have. Daily revenue grew 23 percent month over month. Nobody needed to rewrite the value proposition. The offering was fine. The product just could not grow itself, and no amount of paid traffic fixes that. It only raises the price of every user who leaks back out.

The answer nobody checks: you are measuring the wrong event

Here is the failure I see most often, and the one that makes the marketing-versus-product argument pointless until it is fixed.

One app I looked at recently was running paid campaigns that optimized toward an event buried in an uncategorized bucket in their analytics, an event with no traceable link to a subscription or a dollar. The bidding algorithm was doing its job perfectly, driving down the cost of a signal that did not predict revenue. From the top, it looked like a marketing problem. It also looked like a product problem. It was neither. The path from click to purchase was simply not connected, so no one in the building could actually see which of the other two problems they had.

This is the dead battery in the alarm. The noise is real and the danger might be real too, but the thing screaming at you is the part that broke, and it cannot tell you whether there is a fire. When the measurement layer is down, every debate about marketing quality or product quality is a debate held in the dark. Fix that first, or you are guessing.

When it really is the product, it is usually activation

Two founders of successful subscription apps have hired me to find a marketing problem. Both times it turned out to be activation: new users were not reaching the moment where the product becomes useful, so they never came back and never paid. The best campaign in the world cannot sell a product that people do not get far enough into to understand.

Activation is not retention. Retention is whether they come back. Activation is whether they ever reach first value at all. You cannot fix the second one while the first one is broken, and marketing sits on top of both.

The move

Diagnose in this order. Stop at the first thing that fails.

1. Measurement. Can you trace one specific paid click to one specific dollar of revenue? If not, fix that before anything else. You do not need a data team for the first check: open your ad platform, find the conversion event your campaigns optimize toward, and confirm it fires on an actual purchase or subscription and not on a page view or a signup. If it does not, your bidding is optimizing toward a guess.
2. Activation. What percentage of new users reach the product's core value at least once in the first session or two? If it is low, that is your constraint, and it is not the ad account.
3. Retention. Does the usage curve flatten by day 30, or is it still falling at day 60? A falling curve means you are filling a bucket with holes in it.
4. Positioning and offering. Only now. Does a stranger repeat your pitch back correctly? Do your last five closed deals share a reason for closing?
5. Channel. Last, every time. A channel cannot fix a story nobody believes or a product nobody reaches.

The source

Founders hire me to find a marketing problem. About half the time, the honest finding in the first week is that it is not marketing. That answer is faster and cheaper to act on than a product rebuild, which is the whole reason to look for it before you commit to the expensive story.

Bottom line

A flat revenue line is a smoke alarm, not a verdict.

Before you rebuild the product, check whether the alarm has a battery. Measure the path from click to dollar. Then argue about whose fault it is.