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"(7) Dare to sell what you've got to those customers that want what you have instead of selling what the customer wants but what you haven't got yet and may not
by lsc 16y ago
"(7) Dare to sell what you've got to those customers that want what you have instead of selling what the customer wants but what you haven't got yet and may not be able to deliver in time. Take the feedback you receive and use it to improve the product but unless something is really trivial it is better to sell what you have than to make some promise you can not keep. "
Oh man... this is the hardest and most important lesson ever, I think. The allure of "sell it first, then build it" is very strong, but in the long term, that way lies madness.
- SoftwareMaven 16y agoSelling what you don't have yet can be immensely helpful (cash is helpful :), but one you need to exit that mode rapidly. You also need to ensure you are converging on a product and not just doing services work around a common problem.
- lsc 16y agoif you can pull it off, sure, that's great. the problem is that it's /really/ easy to get yourself into the kind of trouble you don't recover from that way. I understand that different markets are different, but in every business I've run, the limiting factor was my commitment or my reputation (sales) or some combination therof. If I over promise a little, I can deliver for a limited time (as the OP did) at the risk of burnout. It sounds like burnout was a huge factor in the failure of the business this story is about. Burnout of key people can very easily kill a small company. If I over promise a lot and fail, then we start taking hits to the reputation, and if I've accepted pre-payment that I can't pay back, well, at that point it's pretty much over. so yeah, while it can result in dramatically positive outcomes, it's a /very/ high risk move.