The elephant in the room of the free market

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. About the natural selection of the free market.

This idea did not come to me immediately. For quite a long time I was looking at what was happening in a very simplified way. I’m sharing this observation mainly for colleagues in the field — marketers, traffic managers, SMM specialists, and anyone working on the contractor side.

Let’s start with something simple.

What is a free market?

It is a situation where a person faces almost no barriers to entering entrepreneurship. You register a business, choose a niche, start selling. The state does not ask for a marketing degree, does not check whether you understand unit economics, and does not test whether you actually know how demand works.

The basic requirement is simple: declare yourself a business owner and start paying taxes. You also need to stay within the regulations of your niche, which can be stricter or lighter depending on the industry.

And this is where one of the reasons for the endless conflict between clients and contractors hides.

When a person starts a business, their knowledge of markets, marketing, promotion, and strategy is usually very limited. At the same time, the amount of things they realise they do not know is also very small.

If we imagine this as two circles — knowledge and ignorance — both of them start small. The person feels confident that they understand the world around them.

Then reality begins.

The product does not sell.
The ads do not work.
Contractors start saying complicated things.
Funnels, hypotheses, testing, economics, positioning.

At some point the circle of knowledge begins to grow. But together with it the circle of what the person does not understand also expands.

This is where the movement toward the old Socratic formula begins:
“I know that I know nothing.”

Only at this point does an entrepreneur start listening properly.

Contractor reports begin to be read more carefully.
Advice starts to be taken seriously.
The ability to ask the right questions appears.

From this kind of entrepreneur, an experienced client gradually emerges — the kind marketers genuinely enjoy working with.

But there is an important detail.

This path cannot be completed in theory. It cannot be learned from a book, and it cannot be accelerated by advice from a short social media video.

It almost always runs through mistakes, money that has been burned, advertising campaigns that failed, and projects that went in the wrong direction.

The free market is structured in such a way that almost anyone can become an entrepreneur. Becoming a good client for marketing services is much rarer.

For every mature client the market produces quite a few immature ones.

And this seems to be the elephant in the room that people rarely talk about openly.

We often discuss bad contractors. And fairly so — there are many of them.

But the structure of the free market also produces a huge flow of inexperienced clients who are still learning how business and marketing actually work.

If you look at it calmly, the “contractor vs client” conflict begins to look different.

Instead of an anomaly, it looks like a normal stage in the evolution of the market.

At some point it becomes easier to stop being angry at this reality and start working within it — understanding that mature clients do not appear out of nowhere. They are assembled from experience, mistakes, and a long movement through the unknown.

Datalinks record closed. Before Planetfall: 0073-09-23