5 ms·

If I hear one more person say “sell before you build” I'm going to puke

23 points by liuxiaopai 4y ago

shapefrog 4y ago
Same thing goes for 9 out of 10 pieces of fortune cookie entrepreneur advice
azeirah 4y ago
I suppose it's good advice depending on your target audience. Generally, a lot of indie hacker types of entrepreneurs just like building cool things! A bit more proactive on the communicative and sales side is not a bad thing, but I believe it's best to play to your individual strengths.
baxtr 4y ago
I disagree with this interpretation. It is a question of versioning and packaging. Basically, v0 of a product is for testing the initial hypotheses that people are interested in buying at all. And it also serves as a tool for finding the initial "fans" that are excited by your product vision and will help you flesh out the product. "Sell before you build" is just way to communicate this. btw: The post is very short. Here it is: > This is such bad advice. It assumes that everyone will nail their product on the first go. Almost no-one does. > If I went to customers and pitched Songbox to them with what was the initial version of it I had in my head - I would have gotten nothing. And if I'd given up on it at THAT point then I would have missed out on (a couple years later) having a business that's well into X thousand MRR and even more importantly, working with some amazing people and having truly exciting and unique experiences. > There is no doubt that "sell before you build" will work for some people; but everything and anything will work for SOME people. > For the general populace of makers it is crushingly bad advice.
- 01acheru 4y ago
  IMHO I don't think you can have real product fans without a product as much as you cannot have music fans without music. They might be fans of you vision, of your marketing or whatever else but that can be as bad as it can be good when your product finally lands.
- zapperdulchen 4y ago
  Maybe this is the misunderstanding. Reaching out to potential customers is not about "Look here is my idea of a hammer. Would you buy one?", but understanding which problems are solved, which benefits are achieved, which tasks are done, if there was a hammer like that. The bet is that this can be learned faster and less expensive via communication than developing.
rozenmd 4y ago
Same goes for: - Putting up a landing page with an email collection form at the bottom without a strong value-add for the potential user - General idea of MVPs (not saying MVPs don't work, I'm saying the way we're told MVPs have to be bereft of features and polish is bullshit), though this has mostly been replaced with Minimal Loveable Product. - The idea that you have to be first/second to an idea to make money from it (I was 200th to my idea, it's profitable) - The idea that you have to quit your job and "hustle hard" to make a product others will want (I did it in 2 hour chunks before work)
SonOfLilit 4y ago
If you're building something with the goal of selling it, sell before you build. This applies in at least 99% of cases. Just go to potential customers and tell them "hey, in [a few months/years], I'm going to launch a thing that can do this and that for you. Would you like one at prelaunch price?" If customers don't like your initial pitch and don't buy, why would you give up? Iterate on what you're selling. You don't need to build to iterate. Then you can build something people want. I like to phrase that as "as a software consultant, I'm in the business of not writing code. The first rule of this business is to never write code until somebody definitely wants to use it". Of course, if you're building it just for fun, iterate on the code all yu want before you sell it.
- 01acheru 4y ago
  Your comment is the essence of why I totally hate software consultants. "Hi customer, after months of meetings and calls and briefings and checklists and ... here is my final 76 page presentation about an ideal not buildable extremely expensive software that if finished will look like Homer's car" Never had experiences different from the above, be it from big or small players.
  - SonOfLilit 4y ago
    I have never delivered slides as my deliverable. I take projects where the deliverable is either running code written by me (when the code is really tricky to get right) or a product/feature launched by the team I'm supporting. There are consultancies in the CYOA business, and consultancies (or, usually, single consultants) in the delivery business. Both have high customer demand, for different reasons. Admittedly, the first kind usually make a lot more money, but I live nicely.
    - 01acheru 4y ago
      You sound much more a freelance developer or a single person development agency than a software consultant, I guess we simply describe those roles differently and don't assume the same thing when talking about "software consultancy". The thing you are describing sounds like the first phase of a project where you are gathering the requirements, in a one-to-one business relationship with a single customer. "Sell before you build" as far as I understand is usually used in a one-to-many scenario, where you start selling (or better, marketing) a product before building it.
steve_taylor 4y ago
Didn't take long for this to be curated off the front page of HN. Is HN losing traffic to IH?
teekay 4y ago
I don't remember the last time I signed up to a mailing list just to be notified when some random app goes live. Let alone pre-ordering. I would do that if I already trust the organization, which implies it has already launched useful products in the past. For an unknown startup, the idea would have to be truly Earth-shaking for me to sign up. In most cases, I'll just wait until I hear that the app is out, and then try it and consider purchasing. To me, "sell before you build" is a no-go for upstarts with zero audience, whereas "market before you build", or maybe "market as you are building", creates the awareness you'll need to warm people up when you are ready to sell.
- vernon99 4y ago
  This just means that you are not the right customer for a lot of early startups. But it would be a mistake to extrapolate from this anecdotal point, assuming that everybody is like you. There are a lot of people who are very happy to be early adopters, find it fun and valuable to them and to the society. It could be a bit dangerous to rely only on those when building your startup, but having a good combination of these early adopters and pre-sale conversations with late adopters is super important. Zero audience is not a problem btw since a) there’re are usually relevant communities, b) there’s trivially automating cold outreach that is a single best way to test your PMF hypothesis. Edit: typos
  - danaris 4y ago
    While it's true that extrapolating from "me to infinity" is a logical fallacy, that's not the same thing as saying (in the general case) "even if you think it's a bad idea, there will be a lot of people who want it, therefore it's still a good idea", regardless of the reasoning behind why the one person you're talking to thinks it's a bad idea. In this case, I think there's a strong argument to be made that while yes, there are people who will be willing to buy into an unknown startup's unreleased product, by and large, those people are fools (in the sense of "a fool and his money are soon parted", at the very least). There's certainly a segment of our population (which is, completely unsurprisingly and reasonably, overrepresented on HN) that's very excited about startup culture, and wants to believe that any given startup is going to Change The World™...but far, far too many of them fall into one of three categories: 1) Come up with a "new" way of moving money around so that rich people get richer (eg, the entire cryptocurrency space) 2) Make something that looks just flashy enough for them to get bought out by a bigger company 3) Fail outright
cryptica 4y ago
"Sell before you build" is the tech elite's "let them eat cake". It's literally impossible to do unless you have the right connections and raised funding from the right people. Unless your startup received massive media exposure, nobody will part their money for a product which does not yet exist... You need exposure to massive numbers of people to get any measurable success... And without the right personal connections, it costs a prohibitive amount of money to get that kind of exposure. If you're a developer, it would be cheaper for you to build the thing and then try to grow linearly over the years than to pay the cash up front to achieve that kind of reach... What if your product doesn't measure up to expectations? This is a real risk if you got your customers through advertising (selling a dream) instead of winning them over slowly through a superior offering. The problem with selling a dream is that it's essentially impossible to make reality match the idealised image which you projected into the customer's mind... Even in the cases where it does seem to work out and customers make repeat purchases, the product may just be a superficial representation of what the customer actually needed and it could take them a few years to figure out that the product was itself just an extension of the dream, a shell of a solution... There are better alternatives out there.
752963e64 4y ago
Let me tell you that it's hard to work with softwares first... Let me tell you that it's also hard to find skilled ppl in the context you wish to exploit. Let me tell you I saw many clowns telling they are good with computing... But unaware what a heap memory. Says a lot. :)
a_c 4y ago
The building spectrum covers from consulting on one end to crafting on the other end. The first step is to know yourself. Which style are you? Which style you want to be? If you are on the consulting end, talk to people, understand the problem, build a solution, and iterate on it. This is how software has been preached to be built for decades. Waterfall/agile/whatnot are all the same, assuming idea come from somewhere and keep iterating your solution. If you are on the crafting end, you have an ideology to preach. Akin to art in any form, you are both the source of idea and executor. You broadcast your ideology and look for followers. Rich Hickey of clojure, Mike Bostock of D3.js and Bret Victor are on this camp in my opinion. Note that you can hop between crafting and consulting/iterating. But iterating is like newton method, no amount of iterating will get you to answer if the initial guess is too off. So one has to have strong conviction to craft an initial solution with good enough quality before launching into iteration cycles. I've seen many "metric-minded" product people obsessed about iteration without having any conviction on what to build. Without the initial conviction, no amount of iteration can give you clojure, d3.js and co.
Markoff 4y ago
Same here with "just for the cost of a cup of coffee" as a coffee hater and I also think if I pay cost of one coffee here, there and elsewhere them in sum it's much more than cost of a cup.

23 points by liuxiaopai 4y ago

Same thing goes for 9 out of 10 pieces of fortune cookie entrepreneur advice

I suppose it's good advice depending on your target audience. Generally, a lot of indie hacker types of entrepreneurs just like building cool things! A bit more proactive on the communicative and sales side is not a bad thing, but I believe it's best to play to your individual strengths.

baxtr 4y ago

I disagree with this interpretation. It is a question of versioning and packaging. Basically, v0 of a product is for testing the initial hypotheses that people are interested in buying at all. And it also serves as a tool for finding the initial "fans" that are excited by your product vision and will help you flesh out the product. "Sell before you build" is just way to communicate this. btw: The post is very short. Here it is: > This is such bad advice. It assumes that everyone will nail their product on the first go. Almost no-one does. > If I went to customers and pitched Songbox to them with what was the initial version of it I had in my head - I would have gotten nothing. And if I'd given up on it at THAT point then I would have missed out on (a couple years later) having a business that's well into X thousand MRR and even more importantly, working with some amazing people and having truly exciting and unique experiences. > There is no doubt that "sell before you build" will work for some people; but everything and anything will work for SOME people. > For the general populace of makers it is crushingly bad advice.

01acheru 4y ago
IMHO I don't think you can have real product fans without a product as much as you cannot have music fans without music. They might be fans of you vision, of your marketing or whatever else but that can be as bad as it can be good when your product finally lands.
zapperdulchen 4y ago
Maybe this is the misunderstanding. Reaching out to potential customers is not about "Look here is my idea of a hammer. Would you buy one?", but understanding which problems are solved, which benefits are achieved, which tasks are done, if there was a hammer like that. The bet is that this can be learned faster and less expensive via communication than developing.

rozenmd 4y ago

Same goes for: - Putting up a landing page with an email collection form at the bottom without a strong value-add for the potential user - General idea of MVPs (not saying MVPs don't work, I'm saying the way we're told MVPs have to be bereft of features and polish is bullshit), though this has mostly been replaced with Minimal Loveable Product. - The idea that you have to be first/second to an idea to make money from it (I was 200th to my idea, it's profitable) - The idea that you have to quit your job and "hustle hard" to make a product others will want (I did it in 2 hour chunks before work)

SonOfLilit 4y ago

If you're building something with the goal of selling it, sell before you build. This applies in at least 99% of cases. Just go to potential customers and tell them "hey, in [a few months/years], I'm going to launch a thing that can do this and that for you. Would you like one at prelaunch price?" If customers don't like your initial pitch and don't buy, why would you give up? Iterate on what you're selling. You don't need to build to iterate. Then you can build something people want. I like to phrase that as "as a software consultant, I'm in the business of not writing code. The first rule of this business is to never write code until somebody definitely wants to use it". Of course, if you're building it just for fun, iterate on the code all yu want before you sell it.

01acheru 4y ago
Your comment is the essence of why I totally hate software consultants. "Hi customer, after months of meetings and calls and briefings and checklists and ... here is my final 76 page presentation about an ideal not buildable extremely expensive software that if finished will look like Homer's car" Never had experiences different from the above, be it from big or small players.
- SonOfLilit 4y ago
  I have never delivered slides as my deliverable. I take projects where the deliverable is either running code written by me (when the code is really tricky to get right) or a product/feature launched by the team I'm supporting. There are consultancies in the CYOA business, and consultancies (or, usually, single consultants) in the delivery business. Both have high customer demand, for different reasons. Admittedly, the first kind usually make a lot more money, but I live nicely.
  - 01acheru 4y ago
    You sound much more a freelance developer or a single person development agency than a software consultant, I guess we simply describe those roles differently and don't assume the same thing when talking about "software consultancy". The thing you are describing sounds like the first phase of a project where you are gathering the requirements, in a one-to-one business relationship with a single customer. "Sell before you build" as far as I understand is usually used in a one-to-many scenario, where you start selling (or better, marketing) a product before building it.

steve_taylor 4y ago

Didn't take long for this to be curated off the front page of HN. Is HN losing traffic to IH?

teekay 4y ago

I don't remember the last time I signed up to a mailing list just to be notified when some random app goes live. Let alone pre-ordering. I would do that if I already trust the organization, which implies it has already launched useful products in the past. For an unknown startup, the idea would have to be truly Earth-shaking for me to sign up. In most cases, I'll just wait until I hear that the app is out, and then try it and consider purchasing. To me, "sell before you build" is a no-go for upstarts with zero audience, whereas "market before you build", or maybe "market as you are building", creates the awareness you'll need to warm people up when you are ready to sell.

vernon99 4y ago
This just means that you are not the right customer for a lot of early startups. But it would be a mistake to extrapolate from this anecdotal point, assuming that everybody is like you. There are a lot of people who are very happy to be early adopters, find it fun and valuable to them and to the society. It could be a bit dangerous to rely only on those when building your startup, but having a good combination of these early adopters and pre-sale conversations with late adopters is super important. Zero audience is not a problem btw since a) there’re are usually relevant communities, b) there’s trivially automating cold outreach that is a single best way to test your PMF hypothesis. Edit: typos
- danaris 4y ago
  While it's true that extrapolating from "me to infinity" is a logical fallacy, that's not the same thing as saying (in the general case) "even if you think it's a bad idea, there will be a lot of people who want it, therefore it's still a good idea", regardless of the reasoning behind why the one person you're talking to thinks it's a bad idea. In this case, I think there's a strong argument to be made that while yes, there are people who will be willing to buy into an unknown startup's unreleased product, by and large, those people are fools (in the sense of "a fool and his money are soon parted", at the very least). There's certainly a segment of our population (which is, completely unsurprisingly and reasonably, overrepresented on HN) that's very excited about startup culture, and wants to believe that any given startup is going to Change The World™...but far, far too many of them fall into one of three categories: 1) Come up with a "new" way of moving money around so that rich people get richer (eg, the entire cryptocurrency space) 2) Make something that looks just flashy enough for them to get bought out by a bigger company 3) Fail outright

cryptica 4y ago

"Sell before you build" is the tech elite's "let them eat cake". It's literally impossible to do unless you have the right connections and raised funding from the right people. Unless your startup received massive media exposure, nobody will part their money for a product which does not yet exist... You need exposure to massive numbers of people to get any measurable success... And without the right personal connections, it costs a prohibitive amount of money to get that kind of exposure. If you're a developer, it would be cheaper for you to build the thing and then try to grow linearly over the years than to pay the cash up front to achieve that kind of reach... What if your product doesn't measure up to expectations? This is a real risk if you got your customers through advertising (selling a dream) instead of winning them over slowly through a superior offering. The problem with selling a dream is that it's essentially impossible to make reality match the idealised image which you projected into the customer's mind... Even in the cases where it does seem to work out and customers make repeat purchases, the product may just be a superficial representation of what the customer actually needed and it could take them a few years to figure out that the product was itself just an extension of the dream, a shell of a solution... There are better alternatives out there.

752963e64 4y ago

Let me tell you that it's hard to work with softwares first... Let me tell you that it's also hard to find skilled ppl in the context you wish to exploit. Let me tell you I saw many clowns telling they are good with computing... But unaware what a heap memory. Says a lot. :)

a_c 4y ago

The building spectrum covers from consulting on one end to crafting on the other end. The first step is to know yourself. Which style are you? Which style you want to be? If you are on the consulting end, talk to people, understand the problem, build a solution, and iterate on it. This is how software has been preached to be built for decades. Waterfall/agile/whatnot are all the same, assuming idea come from somewhere and keep iterating your solution. If you are on the crafting end, you have an ideology to preach. Akin to art in any form, you are both the source of idea and executor. You broadcast your ideology and look for followers. Rich Hickey of clojure, Mike Bostock of D3.js and Bret Victor are on this camp in my opinion. Note that you can hop between crafting and consulting/iterating. But iterating is like newton method, no amount of iterating will get you to answer if the initial guess is too off. So one has to have strong conviction to craft an initial solution with good enough quality before launching into iteration cycles. I've seen many "metric-minded" product people obsessed about iteration without having any conviction on what to build. Without the initial conviction, no amount of iteration can give you clojure, d3.js and co.

Markoff 4y ago

Same here with "just for the cost of a cup of coffee" as a coffee hater and I also think if I pay cost of one coffee here, there and elsewhere them in sum it's much more than cost of a cup.