> How do you solve discoverability, especially of a new type of product or category? I invented this new gadget call "luminexel". People don't know what it is yet, because it's new. How do people find it in a catalog?

You make a post on Hacker News titled “Show HN: I made this cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!” Some people will think it’s really cool and tell their friends about it. Eventually it will end up on some “curated list of awesome things” website.

Ideally discoverability would be wholly solved by organic word-of-mouth recommendations. First from yourself as the only person who knows this product category exist then from the people who accepted your recommendation, had it solve their problem and finally saw fit to recommend it themselves.

I’ve yet to see a single product that isn’t related to domains existing products solve problems for. That is, I’m aware of any time in history a wholly new category emerged suddenly.

So your question seems like pure fantasy to me — like asking how we’ll slay dragons without ads. I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s a thing which actually needs doing, either.

New products within an existing category show up in catalogs, review articles, etc just fine without ads. As does your highly technical product, for which people in the relevant industry already know the information and/or are already used to narrowing their search to a few products and then requesting additional information.

Your pro-ad arguments seem to be solving problems that don’t actually exist.