Get to the Money Conversation

There are thousands of great ideas and concepts that in theory sound groundbreaking. You won't hear anyone tell you "that is a bad idea" or "no one will ever pay for that"

But the question is, will anyone actually pay for it? If so who and how much. Projections are more an exercise of seeing how much you understand your operating expenses and marketplace. The truth of it is that with any new service it is all a guess until you have actual sales and sales processes to build upon.

Too often we build first and sell second. What are we building for if no one is willing to buy? How much would it cost to put together a demo, a biz dev presentation and set a meeting? A couple of weeks maximum. But when you are done you will know what will work, what won't, what is worthy of an actual sale and at what price.

All of the guessing, planning and building is a waste of time if you don't know if anyone will buy. Sure, some people get lucky and get it right.. Most get the market right, the objective right but the product and deliverable wrong the first couple of times.

I remember the first time I heard Josh Kopleman say "run as fast as you can into a wall, then run as fast as you can in another direction until you stop hitting walls" Probably not the exact quote but you get the picture. At first I thought, is that really a good strategy? If you have no focus how can you succeed? The point is that if you spend all of your time building and planning but have no idea what the market is really willing to do you are wasting your time and investors money. Here is what I would do.

1. Test: Do you have a small budget? Build a few landing pages. Create SEM campaigns and drive people to these landing pages and see what they do. What messages resonate and drive visitors to the "sign up".
2. Keep it simple. Once you have an idea of what fills the pain you are trying to solve, solve the pain. Forget features; solve the pain quickly, easily and cost effectively.
3. Sell. Get it in front of people and get to the money conversation.

Remember that in any sales process there are 3 main steps.

1. Why buy
2. Why buy now
3. Why buy from you

Don't build a "platform" until you know you have a product or process that can get through these three steps to a sale.

I used a lot of terms that imply a definitive "never" or "don't ever"... This doesn't work for every business and every product. However, for the most part the core concept of prove that there is a market willing to buy through an actual sale... that is the best way to build a business.