Ask IH: What do you think about "Sell before you build"?

@dqmonn makes some good points.

I just want to highlight something a lot of founders don't realise...

For 99% of products, it isn't any easier to make your first sale with a built product vs with no product.

For your business to be a success, you need to be able to a) build the product, b) sell the product, and c) provide your customers with enough value to keep them buying.

So, as a new founder, you basically have 3 areas of risk to manage.

The last one, c) is something you won't know until you've built and sold the product.

Of the other two areas of risk (can you build, can you sell), the first is pretty low risk. It takes a long time to build the product but - once you know what you're building - it's very unlikely you suddenly find it impossible to build.

So the biggest risk you can mitigate up front is can you sell this product?

That's just one (overlooked) reason why you should do sales first. Because it's the quickest way to prove that your product won't work (and save yourself a lot of time).

This is 100% the approach you should take, but maybe not in the form you're thinking of.

Joel's approach was bold. He marketed Buffer as if it were a full product, and looked for payment upfront without having a tool built. It's a strategy that can work, and has been implemented many times since then to prove demand.

I believe you don't have to hold cash in your hand, THEN build a product. But you need to verify that a demand exists, and having someone pay upfront is the most sure way to establish that.

Other things that work:

• It's a pressing problem you have yourself. Something you'd spend money on if it would exist. It's likely that others will have the same problem too.
• You talked to someone upfront who has this problem. Verify that others have it too, make them pay for it or ASK if they will pay for it, then build.
• Make a free version of it, establish that people could not live without it, then charge.

You need proof that something you build will be worth your time. The best way to do so is to have someone pay for it. Sometimes that doesn't work, and it's also scary to ask for money without anything to back it up. The least you should do is go out and talk to 10-20+ people, see if they have the problem you're imagining in your head, get a waterproof intent that they'll pay for it, then build.

Great idea it mitigates the biggest risk the startup may have. But as developer, it's difficult to internalize that particular idea, as we love to build and hate sales :)

My two cents on this approach; it only works under specific conditions. Mostly when the product or service is not too important to the client. How easy is it to sell medical tech without having a prototype at least or security software that's yet to be tried and tested?

I think it's a little slimy to market it as if it already exists, especially for hard technologies. I think it's a great idea to do preorders as long as they're honest. That being said I wish I had done this since it makes the validation that much more concrete.

This is a great question and something I'm wondering about. I'd love to see a few examples, creative ways to go about this, etc.