Most founders build their product and hope for sales. Here’s what to do instead.
A few years ago I watched a startup order branded towels before making a sales call.
It was a developer tools company running a textbook product-led growth play. They offered their product completely free on a six month trial. Thousands of developers downloaded it and seemed to love it. VCs noticed and the founders raised millions. Then came the T-shirts, the water bottles, and the towels, all stamped with the logo.
Nobody had confirmed the only thing that really
But nobody had confirmed the only thing that really mattered: whether a single one of those users would pay when the trial ended.
Turns out they wouldn’t. GitHub already did the job well enough, and it was free. The pivot to top-down enterprise sales didn’t work either. In the end, all they had left was an office full of swag.
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Most founders build first and sell second
After three decades of building startups, running startups, and teaching about startups at HBS and MIT Sloan, I have seen hundreds of founders run the same faulty sequence: Incorporate, build the product, take it to market, then try to sell it and hope somebody buys it.
That is exactly what the developer tools company did. The engineering was strong, the users were real, and the growth charts seemed promising. They took the product to market and found out, after the money was spent and the towels were printed, that nobody would buy it.
Source: www.inc.com
