Sorry, I'm not sure if you want me to address the colloquialism or the statement so I'll address both.

"The bar is higher" essentially means that a task is more difficult than it previously was.

In the past it used to be easier to create low-medium quality content around a subject and be ranked well for specific phrases in search engines. This has gotten progressively harder to do and will likely only get harder going forward.

However, if you create high quality content in the area around your product then people will seek it out and you will also get the benefit of good search engine ranking. High quality content can vary, but it is essentially stuff that truly adds value in the area of your product.

You can look on Hacker News and other similar sites for companies that are doing this well. In some extreme cases you even have companies generating content that doesn't seem to be remotely related to their product, but it is still getting eyeballs and very likely sales (e.g. http://priceonomics.com/ and their blog).

In addition to blogging and generating content you should also be spending time cultivating and nurturing an email list of potential prospects.

Does this take a lot of time? Yes. I believe that it is a generally accepted rule that you should spend as much time marketing as you do developing. This is something that is easy to say and hard to do though. I know that even I, a full-time digital marketer in my day job, spend more developing my product than I do marketing it.

Yeah you addressed it fine. It's interesting that priceonomics seem like a blog directed towards their web crawling service. This is a very interesting play.