Life Pro Tip: Don't waste more than 20 minutes on pre-sales or demo calls.

From day 0, my goal was not to be like Apple, but to be like Amazon - customer first.

I thought asking customers their needs, and want, getting to spend time on demos were worth it.

Since I run a single person saas, I did a lot of pre-sales as

1. I wanted product validation.
2. I wanted to build something people wanted to pay for.

I didn't count anything as a pre-sale until we discussed everything over call, down to the specifics and the price.

Let's talk about 2 specific ones from the past.

1. Customer A - First demo - 1 Feb 22, Call with their developer to see if it's easy for integration - 13 Feb 22, Follow up message to actually message the product - 3 Mar. That's a long time. One thing that bothered me was instead of them ghosting, a message saying "We went with another solution / we don't need your product anymore / we are building our own solution" message after 2 hours in calls seemed ethical instead of ghosting.

Mistake? Mine for sure. I couldn't ship without certain things I considered were critical and I learnt to prioritize shipping better.

2. Customer B - first call - 4 March 22, asks me if I could deliver right away and he doesn't care about the UI, only wants the API. Negotiates the price. He gives me the deadline 7 Mar 22, or else I go to someone else. I was hustling. I didn't sleep, shower or even eat. My girlfriend called me psychotic, my family thought I was a psychopath. And I missed so many important family events. Guess what I delivered in 18 hours, a day before the deadline.

Mistake? Mine. I was looking through rose tinted glasses. Don't trust anyone till the money hits the bank account. But what seemed unfair in this case was, I shipped faster - I overdelivered, cut the price and the person wasn't even ready to try the product. That hurt. Not paying a visit to my niece and caring more about a person who I shouldn't have trusted, hurt me.

Sure the title isn't justified because I discovered so many issues with my other customers thanks to sales calls and demo calls, but it's a note to yourself that this is only a validation call and not a sales call.

If there's anything you can learn from me, it's the fact that customer obsession is not actually destroying yourself to serve the customer (or potential one). No one's your customer till they have paid you. It's not worth sacrificing your health and mind for a potential customer. Your time will come. When I spoke to other founders, they had stories of other founders being told if they just added one feature and when they did after burning their midnight oil, and then the customer ghosted. A good advice a fellow founder gave me was, if your customer doesn't pay for what you have now they're unlikely to buy because you added one more feature.

On the contrary, when you're a customer to someone else and you tell them if you do x, I'll definitely buy and make them spend 18+ hours with hope - you have the freedom to buy an alternative or decide you don't want it at anytime but you must have the courage to say no when they ask you instead of ghosting them like a coward.