Does marketing really make up about 80% of the business?

There are many SaaS platforms that, from a tech standpoint, aren’t anything extraordinary, but they still generate significant revenue. Some even have surprisingly low traffic for their potential. A friend of mine with extensive experience in SaaS and business mentioned that the key to a successful SaaS business isn’t just a well-developed product, but a strong marketing campaign.
For instance, consider the difference between jenni.ai and Grammarly. While they offer somewhat different functionalities, both are writing tools for text and rephrasing. Grammarly gets 62 million visitors, whereas jenni.ai has under 2 million users a month.

50/50 is the situation. The product-market fit of the best startups is outstanding. meaning that they created the best feature set possible for their intended audience.
You won’t keep your first clients if you don’t develop the proper features. However, if you aren’t aiming for the correct clients, they won’t be interested in the goods and won’t register.

Once the product and engineering are solid, the next step is to focus on selling. As long as you can keep selling, you can continue investing in sales efforts.

Sales and marketing are like force multipliers, but they need enough force behind them to be effective.
Consider the difference between jenni.ai and Grammarly.
You’re mixing up marketing with overall strategy.
Grammarly got the strategy right. They were first to market (beating jenni.ai by about a decade). They have excellent branding (“Grammarly fixes grammar”). They packaged it well initially as a popular Chrome extension when those were trending. Now, it’s featured prominently in Chrome’s recommended extensions. Their positioning was spot-on: a generous free tier and an easy setup.
Timing, branding, positioning, and packaging are all crucial aspects of business strategy. Grammarly nailed all these elements. Without them, no amount of sales or marketing will make up for a poorly positioned product you’d be stuck trying to sell something that just doesn’t work.

The response that everyone dreads to hear is “it depends.”
According to what you’re building, yes.

“Helping your target customers reach their dream/goals with your product” is what marketing is all about. You should research, observe, and get to know your customers in order to accomplish this. This is advertising. Even if you have a fantastic product, you cannot market it if you do not know to whom to sell it.

Eighty percent seems about right. if not more.
Product development will likely take up more of your time in the beginning, but eventually you should devote the majority of your resources including time and money to marketing.
Most founders are unaware of how much extra labor it takes to attract consumers to buy their product. even if the product is outstanding.

Time is of the essence. The business is much simpler if you are the first to launch or if you identify a trend. Much simpler than, say, having excellent marketing

Time and money are the two sides of the issue.
Consider any SaaS startup with between 10 and 100 employees. How many of them are marketers, in your opinion? Not more than 20%, I wager. According to TIME, the development to marketing ratio is 80%.
Currently, what amount do you believe they invest in marketing? Although it’s difficult to estimate, I’d say it’s between 10% and 50% of the entire budget.
Therefore, I find it unbelievable that there are businesses who dedicate 80% of their budget and 80% of their workforce to marketing.

Everything has the capacity to expand greatly if marketing is done correctly, but it must be done correctly. Too many businesses prioritize short-term outcomes over long-term benefits.

The healthiest companies allocate between 50 and 60 percent of their budget to marketing and sales. That’s what we carry out. In other industries, I’m sure it’s even higher. Almost all of the struggling or failing firms that I coach underspend there.