From Hacking to Marketing

People achieve big goals when they have both skills: the ability to build something and the ability to make people want it. Kind of like supply and demand. Progress gets stuck when either is missing. In this context, supply means the ability to build something, while demand means people actually wanting it. Of course, this is an oversimplification, there are dozens of other factors. But as a mental framework for thinking about why some technologies take off and others don’t, it’s been useful for me.

I used to do web application security. I did bug bounties, which were a lot of fun and challenging as hell. I also earned my bachelor’s degree in information systems and technologies. I’d say I’ve developed some understanding of cyber security, even though it is still a drop in the ocean. But that is only the supply side of the equation. My technical background gives me the ability to build, but it doesn’t teach me how to make people want what I build.

I want to start my own company in the future. For that, I need to work on both sides of the equation.

That’s why I’m now focusing on understanding the demand side. Marketing teaches how people make decisions, what they pay attention to, and what makes them act. Changing my focus from hacking to marketing is a difficult choice because I am leaving years of experience, better pay, and a more advanced career on the table and starting from scratch in a seemingly unrelated field. However, to go after my goals, I need to understand both.

Hacking, in a technical sense, is mainly just experimentation. Run a payload, analyze the response, think of new ways, and do it again and again. That is what eventually makes a cyber security analyst a hacker. Running so many experiments on countless scenarios builds this hacker mindset. After a while, you become able to find vulnerabilities even without sitting in front of a computer, because it is a mindset.

Hacking, in its broader sense, means breaking patterns and finding unusual ways of doing things. I’m not speaking of finding new exploitation methods or attack vectors. I’m speaking of something that applies to everything, everywhere. That mindset of finding unusual approaches is what I believe will transfer to marketing. In other words, my technical skills help me build, that’s the supply. And the hacker mindset itself might help me generate demand too. In this sense, testing new messaging and testing new payloads are the same thing. Finding new ways to reach people and mapping an attack surface also follow the same logic. Both are about experimenting creatively until you find what works.

I won’t pretend that marketing excites me the way cyber security does. Not a chance. But I’ve realized that building something nobody wants is worse than not building at all. I’ve seen brilliant technical projects die because nobody knew they existed or understood their value. Lacking these skills means leaving what I build to the void. In an age of so much information and such short attention spans, nobody will spend hours understanding what I offer, how it benefits them, and why they should pay for it. So it’s become a necessary skill for the goals I’m chasing.

Despite the title, I don’t see this as a “from… to…” or as a change in my path. It is more like creating another lane in my path, so that I can move more freely and faster in the future. And if I fail, it is not the end of the world. I would still have worked on my hacker mindset, just in a different domain.

That is a calculated risk I’m taking with my career. Let’s see how it plays out.