I’m embarrassed to sell my product
We’ve been building this B2B service for over 6 months.
With my co-founder, we invested over $10,000 of personal funds already to develop and optimise the process.
BUT, the quality of the product is not where we expected or wanted it to be 😩
Recently, we ran out of personal finances and decided to start looking for customers.
It is expected that flowing cash will help us optimise the product.
But I just can’t pitch the suboptimal product that isn’t bringing that much value to the customers.
Is it normal to kind of “fake it till you make it” and try to build the product on the fly??
It's going to be super hard to find an investor interested in a company with no customers and no magic sauce. Find customers first, we are all embarrassed about our MVPs, that's normal. Find a customer that buys into your vision, not just where you are right now. Sell your vision.
Disclaimer: I never managed to do that, so I'm not speaking from personal success experience.
Thanks for your valuable input!
It sounds like you were building a solution in search of a problem.
You should 100% start with customers, figure out their actual problem, and be building it for them. Get them on board as soon as possible, collecting feedback so that you can build the right thing.
I can't vote because the situation is complication and I don't even have an opinion. I totally understand your feelings. I'd be embarrassed to pitch 100%-ready product!
In your situation, I would focus on main, most important features that solve main pains (many users are ready to use a not-finished product if it solves some critical problems), and keep working on the quality of the product. Good luck!
Thank you! It’s a good advice, I appreciate it! But the thing is that we are a lead generation service and by not generating enough leads or having insufficient lead quality we are basically failing on the single feature we offer... I’m afraid our customers won’t get the desired ROI when working with us.
You will have to get customers anyway. No any investors are interested in a product that don't have customers. You should prove you can earn, else it doesn't make any sense to invest in you. You can try, though, but you will see how hard it is.
Well, again you can do 2 things in parallel: improving your product and looking for investors.
It’s also hard emotionally because the service is really expensive.
Well, nobody forced you set a high pricing, you can start from a lower price, then continuously increase.
Why would someone invest in a business if it's only solving your own problem?
You can't love your product / idea too much, you need to find someone else who also suffer the same problem. If not, either the problem is not worth solving or it's not big enough where people would pay for.
Go find customers or pivot.
Thanks for your input. Currently focused on getting more paid customers.
Ship early, ship often, listen to your users
This comment was deleted a year ago
Yes, we have built this service for ourselves and have been using it.
We also have a few "free" customers that we work for (just to test our process), which results in a high burn rate.
We also successfully tried selling the service before.
Our first attempt to get an external customer onboard resulted into a refund for the same reason (our process did not live up to their expectations).
This comment was deleted a year ago
Emailed you 😉 We’re still in stealth mode
I feel like we are about $10,000-$15,000 away with the current burn rate from achieving a state-of-the-art process that customers are going to be happy with and the offer would be a no-brainer.