And believe me, if your sales and marketing team are any good they'll be sweating blood trying to do that. But it may not be possible. In fact, pounds to pennie

And believe me, if your sales and marketing team are any good they'll be sweating blood trying to do that. But it may not be possible. In fact, pounds to pennies it isn't. (Won't it be a founder selling anyway? I reckon it's a tremendous advantage if your biz dev person/people know one end of Textmate from the other and can do prototype-building spadework, too. It's hard to really get how a job feels if you've never done it. Marketers gotta code and coders gotta market...) Big, slow thinking sessions ignore this: in an early stage startup you don't know what you're selling. You don't know until you sell it. So you need to find out by showing people endless variations on your core theme, and an iota of effort put into making one which doesn't sell is wasted effort, and wasted effort is death. You are going to kill nearly all your features. That's code which gets discarded, but it's served it's purpose - working out what the business really is.