Sales — Production — Technology. Sales comes first, because it's what keeps you alive. But most people default to the reverse: technology, then production, then sales.
And if you as a founder cannot sell, no one else can. I know founders got into conflicts or just quit not to face the selling part of the equation. Very important piece of the puzzle.
Love this article. Indeed it’s very easy to stay stuck in the whole building mode, rather than looking at distribution and strategy. Without those two, then there’s nothing left of your dream to stand upon.
What resonated with me was this, "If nobody understands the pain." This is exactly necessary to sell products and services for some future event (i.e. life insurance, or in my case, transition planning for business owners). You have to understand the pain today to be motivated to prevent the pain in the future. thank you for posting!
If it were so easy as "built it and they will come", we'd all be billionaires! One of the most painful lessons any founder learns early on is it doesn't matter if you have a great product if you can't get it out. A mediocre product with a great GTM strategy will still see the light of day. Founders put too much emphasis on just the product, when they need to be thinking about sales before they even start the first line of code.
The "product refinement as avoidance" is something I have suffered in the past... this is why shipping fast and failing iterations are key to get it right. Still learning though!
Attention is quickly becoming the scarcest resource in the world
Exactly 💯 Attention is the whole fight now.
A good product still has to earn enough of it before anyone can care.
Good products STILL need demand, I love that reminder
That’s the bit I keep coming back to. The product can be great, but people still need a reason to notice it and understand why it matters.
I couldn’t agree more with this. Typically build is associated with launch metrics and not scale metrics. Thats where it all breaks down.
Sales — Production — Technology. Sales comes first, because it's what keeps you alive. But most people default to the reverse: technology, then production, then sales.
And if you as a founder cannot sell, no one else can. I know founders got into conflicts or just quit not to face the selling part of the equation. Very important piece of the puzzle.
Selling is the bit that makes the whole thing real.
You can hide in the product for ages, but eventually someone has to sit across from the buyer and find out whether the pain is strong enough.
The product alone won't carry you anymore, but a clear offer and a good story will.
The offer has to make the pain feel close enough to act on.
A product can be good and still feel easy to ignore if the buyer doesn’t understand why it matters now.
Thanks for sharing
Love this article. Indeed it’s very easy to stay stuck in the whole building mode, rather than looking at distribution and strategy. Without those two, then there’s nothing left of your dream to stand upon.
Building mode is comfortable because there’s always one more thing to fix.
The market tells you very quickly whether the thing you’re improving is the thing people actually care about.
The volume of Apps will become overwhelming just like content - distribution will become even harder for most & easy for the few
AI is going to make the volume problem brutal.
When everyone can build more, distribution becomes the part that decides who gets seen and who just adds to the pile.
What resonated with me was this, "If nobody understands the pain." This is exactly necessary to sell products and services for some future event (i.e. life insurance, or in my case, transition planning for business owners). You have to understand the pain today to be motivated to prevent the pain in the future. thank you for posting!
Yes, that’s a great example.
If the pain is too far in the future, the job is even harder because people don’t feel the cost today.
You have to make the future problem feel real enough now.
If it were so easy as "built it and they will come", we'd all be billionaires! One of the most painful lessons any founder learns early on is it doesn't matter if you have a great product if you can't get it out. A mediocre product with a great GTM strategy will still see the light of day. Founders put too much emphasis on just the product, when they need to be thinking about sales before they even start the first line of code.
If “build it and they will come” worked, everyone with a decent product would be rich by now (including me!!!).
The painful bit is that a weaker product with better sales can still beat a stronger one that nobody understands.
The "product refinement as avoidance" is something I have suffered in the past... this is why shipping fast and failing iterations are key to get it right. Still learning though!
That line is painfully familiar.
Product refinement can feel useful because it keeps you busy and gives you something controllable to fix. Shipping forces the market to answer back.
The product can be strong and still lose if nobody understands why it matters.
💯 A good product still needs the market to understand why it should care.