"We never spent money on advertising, ever." - The World's Most Successful Man

there are lots of multi=million dollar companies that do not advertise, but do you know what they have? They have a sales force and sometimes good sales people are better than any advertising. The same is true for internet marketers and their affiliates

al

Musk is being exceedingly disingenuous with this. While he may not spend money on advertising technically he spends a FORTUNE on PR people doing PR which really is just another form of advertising.

Sometimes, it's not always about advertising. Word of mouth alone in the corporate world can make a world of difference. Quality over quantity is another thing to remember.

Think about In N' Out Burger for example. I don't remember seeing a commercial from them, but they have achieved nothing but long lines at every location. Why? Word of mouth.

You don't need an advertising budget to be successful, you need the right mindset to be successful.

A lot of people, when they get started, have no money for advertising.

Some of them FIND a way to get the money so that they can advertise. When that happens, they start to get the ball rolling (leads to sales).

Those who take their excuse and never spend a dime for ads, never make it in this business. They keep trying free marketing over and over again and one day when nothing seems to be moving in their business, then QUIT.

Since when is investing millions of dollars all over the US to establish storefronts not advertising?

Also factor in the millions of dollars Tesla spends on lawyers fighting individual states to establish stores (turn on the news).

We've been very successful so far without investing in advertising, but honestly I think of that less as something to be proud of than something to remedy in the future. It's not that I would necessarily change anything that we've done in the past -- resources are limited and so you do have to pick your battles strategically, and so I've think we've done well to prioritize building our site using free (though admittedly work intensive) traffic sources. But I also recognize that as our business matures, we need to be utilizing as many sources of traffic as possible and if getting an extra user costs us $1, but makes us $2 over the long term, that's an opportunity I don't want to pass up.

Maybe the ROI in advertising for Elon Musk's businesses don't make financial sense, or maybe he's willing to forgo the added profit for being able to brag about not ever using advertising. But I find that it rarely pays to be absolutist when it comes to which tactics and techniques you use when building your business; I'd rather have a full set of tools at my disposal as my company evolves, as my competition responds and as my users' needs change.

When I first started to sell my product, I tried to advertise it but got very few sales spending a lot of money. I stopped promoting, gave a version of the product for free and got many sales on the premium version from the users of the free one. Still trying to figure my way into advertising so I can increase earnings.

Elon smells like a real man, soooo musky.

I think it depends on how you define advertising. If you look at advertising as just put up signs or sending out flyers than okay. But if you created your business from word-of-mouth than do you charge yourself for the cost of your time to create the wordflow?

If you have affiliates it's no necessary advertising