EXTRA EXTRA

A newsletter about early sales from The Extra Group

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The road to startup success is paved with misconceptions. None are more tricky than the myths we tell ourselves about sales.

In this three-email series (which I’m affectionately calling “Mythbusters: Early Sales Edition”), I’ll dismantle some of the beliefs that can hold early-stage founders back from building a sustainable business with recurring, reliable revenue.

This week we’ll tackle Myth #1: “I can’t sell yet because my product isn’t ready.”

I know you’ve heard the startup mantra from Reid Hoffman: “If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."

It’s become gospel amongst the startup community, but I have a problem with it.

It suggests you must already have a version of your product in order to sell. This implication can be really dangerous for founders.

While this mantra stresses that your product doesn't have to be perfect, it does imply that product development must precede sales.

The problem is, more often than not, founders will spend time building something that just won’t be embarrassing enough. Once you’ve started building, it’s so hard to resist the urge to tinker and perfect.

Understanding this natural impulse, I don’t recommend waiting for an embarrassing MVP to go to market. Instead, no matter where you are in your product development journey, you can and should start selling now.

Here are a few reasons why.

1. Selling early isn’t the risk you think it is.

Founders often have a fear around selling if a product isn’t immediately ready to use. But let’s talk through the real risks of this scenario.

If someone wants to buy, and your product isn’t ready yet, you will not lose the deal. If a prospect has real demand for your product – a true, genuine need to solve the problem that you’re tackling – it’s likely that they’ll happily wait.

Now, if you find yourself in this situation, you’ll want to do a few things:

1. Get to know the buyer's needs more deeply, and integrate their feedback into your product work.
2. Invest in the relationship with white glove onboarding as you finalize your offer. They’ll be more likely to use and enjoy your product, and refer other customers.
3. Set expectations about when they can get started, and do everything in your power to hold to that promise.
4. Put together the most minimally viable offer that will give them a great experience.

Assuming you steward your relationships with any eager customers properly, there's no reason you can't start selling.

2. Learning and building with a real customer is paramount.

When you're pre-product-market-fit, you aren’t selling for revenue’s sake. You're selling to learn what will unlock repeatable sales.

So, if you go out and sell to an early customer, that is the golden opportunity to learn.

We want to prioritize learning and building with a customer over impressing them with a polished product. Therefore, to solve customers' problems and learn from them ASAP, don't be afraid to blend product and services.

As you scale, you'll want to productize these services. But in the early stages, providing value through a mix of product and services is far more cost- and time-effective to get your concept into customers’ hands.

Remember: a customer genuinely interested in solving their problem won’t care about your delivery method. As one of my clients recently put it, they’d accept a solution from “three geese in a trenchcoat.” They don’t care! They just want their problem solved.

3. If you start selling and there isn't demand, you've done yourself a favor.

So, we’ve de-risked how to manage customers who want to buy if you go to market before your product is available. Alas, the reality is that immediate demand is unlikely.

Being a founder is insanely tough, not least because finding genuine market demand takes time and persistent effort. Most post-PMF startups have had to tweak and modify for months or even years to hit repeatable sales.

You'll need to start selling to learn what works. As I’ve shared before (and will harp on again in the future, rest assured), selling is the best research you can do because it’s real signal. The sooner we go out to get it, the better.

Selling early offers another crucial, less-obvious benefit: it helps you build sales into a consistent part of your daily life as a founder.

It is incredibly tempting to stay in Hypotheticalsville, as I call it. For almost every founder I know, they’d prefer to dream about their product, work on their website, or I don’t know… do just about anything else.

The earlier you develop your sales muscles, the stronger they’ll be when your product is in good shape, and the only thing left to do is sell.

If you start to book sales calls when your product isn’t perfect or even done, there’s much less to lose than you might think.

But from increasing your comfort with selling, to learning what kind of messaging and positioning will hit with your market, to making sales a regular habit… there is so much to gain.

This is Extra Extra, a newsletter about the tactics and mindsets that drive early sales. I’m Caroline Fay, and I’m an exited social impact founder that’s spent my career launching and selling new products. I help non-traditional tech founders build sustainable, recurring revenue.

Caroline Fay

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