Building your product or getting customers — which comes first?
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Today’s question comes from Permal. My co-founder and I are at an impasse. My co-founder thinks we should build our product fully and then seek customers and I think we need customers to sign up before we build it out. What’s the best approach?
This disagreement is actually a good thing because if you weren’t having this discussion something is probably wrong.
I believe that you should take the approach of getting your idea validated by potential customers before you ever move on to build a product. There are many ways to validate an idea, you can talk to people one-on-one, you can create a pre-launch landing page, get letters of intent from customers, or even take their money ahead of time.
The problem these days is that it’s too easy to build something. Ten years ago, it was hard to build an app, but that’s no longer the case. So too often, people build something without ever knowing if it’s a good idea or not.
Validating your idea and building your MVP
You don’t want to try to differentiate yourself from competitors by way of features. You have to separate yourself by approaching a different set of customers who haven’t considered your competitors yet because their messaging doesn’t solve for their problem.
In order to validate your idea, you should have some type of MVP so that you can make decisions about your product and messaging direction from actual data, not just from thinking it’s what your potential customers will want.
One-on-one conversations often don’t work for validating ideas because people lie. They are more than happy to tell you they’d use your product when it’s ready, but they won’t put their money where their mouth is. The second best thing you can do beyond getting money upfront is to fake the sale. To get started on faking the sale, watch our four-part video series that gives you all of the details you need to get up and running.
“One-on-one conversations often don’t work for validating ideas because people lie.”
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