With limited launch resources and to increase speed to market, which pillar is the least impactful?

This one is a thorny question and definitely not a black and white one. The answer will very depending on your product, industry, marketplace, etc. For instance, OpenAI didn't put a lot of resources into marketing ChatGPT but despite that it has taken the world by storm; because of great engineering and usability so focus on marketing wasn't relevant as much at least for now. On the other hand, there're some cool and neatly designed tools right here on PH (nice MVPs) but not many people are aware of them, so in this case they need more focus on marketing and outbound demand generation for now because focusing too much on engineering might not be a great idea if you don't have tangible user base.

In my opinion, it's crucial to carefully weigh the pros and cons of each pillar and their potential impact on the launch before making a decision.

Without a doubt Paid Ads can be eliminated from a tight budget plan if need be. It forces founders to find organic channels for growth and build their audiences the healthy way. Ads can then be brought on as a supplemental marketing push once you have the resources

I really don't know. I've been struggling with this for the past couple of days as I've been building amihot. The designs in Figma are immaculate, but I'm just not a developer, so the UI/UX suffers when I go to execute. And I sure as heck haven't been doing enough marketing for it. But I'd probably say that dev and design are actually inseparable.

I would say development as long as you have an MVP. MVP mindset is king, whereas perfectionism is super likely to drive many startups towards failure. In this unbelievably competitive digital market no product is going to sell itself, it's not Y2K anymore. Talking about competition, weak UX is a major issue. Audiences have had enough SaaS marketing done towards them. So, within the few seconds of time and attention our online audiences have to spare, we 'have to' present them an impeccable UX. Products definitely need a constant push IMO, so I wouldn't go with eliminating marketing efforts. If you don't have a significant traction and expect to 'blow up' after "this one feature" which everyone thinks "definitely would sell", how are you planning to grow if things don't go as planned after months of development in the dark? Edit: When we say marketing I see plenty of people ignoring organic growth, which could work wonders in the mid-long run. As long as startups are not already a global phenomenon like OpenAI, I doubt that any of them can replicate OpenAI's phenomenal growth. They didn't build that reputation overnight.

I would say design is a part of marketing. However, UX and usability are extremely important and essentially part of development. Without dev, you have no product. So even though marketing is extremely important, development is needed for the product to exist. We do a lot of marketing for evoke-app.com, but development is extremely important.

This is a great question, lots of founders struggling with it. I do know it from my experience as I worked for quite long with the startups. And actually this is the point that inspired us to build our product TheSprkl (https://www.producthunt.com/post...). We did it for internal purposes initially, saw the impact and now want to share it with the community. So basically with our framework we help to reduce time for the design and development and help quickly build MLP (minimum lovable product) So my answer will be development probably - as in order to launch sucessfully you need to have something small that will resolve key users pain and will be wow in terms of usability. And without marketing it would be quite hard to let the world know about you and gather valuable feedback for further growth

It truly depends on the case, but I believe interacting with customers and creating a funnel for customer acquisition can offer more valuable insights and guide you toward the next steps.

I voted development, because in my experience in MVP it does not matter if the product is perfect, it is important to validate it. MVP stands for Minimum viable product. This approach is crucial to validate your idea, to understand how the market responds and to understand if your development pipeline needs to be revised. Design is crucial, because if your product does not have a good design and UX then it will not be easy to validate it at all. Marketing should never be sacrificed, but it does not have to be paid for. In the case of Zulla we invested the first month 3k € in social adv, in a campaign with a micro influencer (20k IG and 20k Tiktok), offering a freemium and we created partnerships with small online magazines and newspapers, offering publication licences in exchange. We started doing some SEO (homemade, so not perfect). The result was a rapid growth of users interested in trying the product. This was of course also driven by mail marketing activities to keep the user warm and to recover unsatisfied users in the first phase (new feature releases, free credit recharges). The important thing in this phase is to monitor what happens to the people who use your product (we did this with hotjar and by monitoring events in the platform), in order to immediately understand the direction to take. In the meantime, we started to cash in and this allowed us to self-finance the development team and create a product that was attractive to both investors and banks. Obviously this is my experience, but I hope it can give you useful insights into finding the right balance.

I think Marketing is the first one to go when the funding is tight. But tbh, no product markets itself specially in SaaS. The market is so brutal that you have to fight for space.

I voted for Marketing, Development is the foundation of your product and design is the overall perception of your product while we can market the product, if we want loyal customers in the long run, Development and Design should have the highest priority. Marketing sometimes come in naturally e.g. Word of mouth