Thank you for your $0.02; this might be really obvious to you, but could you be kind and enlighten the oblivious engineering crowd on this forum and be more specific as to what kind of value-add does sales and marketing add to a early-stage hardware startup or any consumer-oriented tech startup in general?
I disagree with your assumption that this is an engineering crowd. I would say entrepreneurship is at least as important to the HN culture as engineering.
You ask a huge question, which is discussed every day all around the internet.
But to take a high level stab at it:
Marketing is crucial to an early-stage hardware startup to start to determine if anyone actually wants to buy what you're proposing to build. Good luck getting money from a VC, much less a customer, if you can't talk intelligently about your target market, and demonstrate an ability to connect with it.
Sales becomes paramount after Version 1.0 is released, when you have to demonstrate that your business is actually profitable. Many engineers are under the impression that, if the quality is high enough, the product will sell itself. While this is true for the (tiny) subset of your market that cares enough to really investigate your product, it seems that a great sales team with a mediocre product will outsell a mediocre sales team with a great product more often than not.
There's a lot of nuance to getting partnerships and getting distribution on your product. It's a different mindset that needs to be learned. In most cases, early-stage web startups should have at least one person who is capable of getting in the door (at minimum, an engineering person who can also do biz dev). It is rarely the case that you just make something and let the orders stream in. People don't know about the product yet and there's a lot of work involved in convincing them that you are capable of actually producing the device at scale or even at all. Just off the top of my head, if you see things like Twitter using bit.ly instead of tinyurl like what happened earlier this year, that wasn't a technical decision, that was done through business development and leverage.
It really depends on what it is you are producing, but in this particular case of the JooJoo/Crunchpad/whatever marketing and sales is probably part of the fundamental strategy. If a lot of time and money has been invested in something, it would be a major oversight to not have somebody who can specialize in distribution/marketing.
