How I Sold a $2,000 Product I hadn’t Built Yet

In 2010, I doomed my first startup from the beginning. I never gave it a chance. Through reflection on my failure, I grew and became empowered to sell a product before I hadn’t even started building.

If you only read one thing and skip the rest of this article, here is my biggest takeaway:

Startup sales is about understanding and solving problems. Customers buy solutions, not features. Tweet This

Learning to Sell

Some of the sales books I read

I figured what better way to learn about sales than to do it as a job. I had no idea how to switch from working as a software developer to working in sales, but hey, at least I had a goal. In September 2010 I successfully landed a 20% sales, 80% software development job at a friend’s new company. I worked hard. I learned a ton, and after 1 grueling year, I felt good about my sales numbers, process, and close rates.

Discovering a Problem

I’d also become a podcast junkie. When I was doing dishes, mowing the lawn, driving, walking, I was listening to podcasts. One of the podcasts I listened to was Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income. Each episode he shared interesting knowledge for entrepreneurs. Two ideas were particularly interesting to me: preselling products and earning income from websites.

When I like ideas I want to try them. First I decided to try building an income generating website. I built and tried to market a website where I shared bitcoin investing results: win, lose, or draw.

I realized creating websites in 2014 was just about as hard as creating them in the 90s. Everything was more complex now. I wanted a lightning fast website, load times under 1 second. Being a software developer, I used a nerdy open source project called Jekyll and I proudly had sub-second load times. On the downside, editing websites was difficult. Actually, editing is probably a bit of a stretch. I was coding my website.

I had a feeling from talking to business owners and manager over the years that many of them wanted better experiences too. I thought wait a minute, why don’t I build what I want to see in the world?

I think many small business owners only have one person managing a marketing website that is a pain in their neck. I think they would gladly have something simple and easy to use.

This time though I didn’t want to build a product no one bought. This time I wanted to make sure people would use the product I spent time coding.

Prospecting the Presale

I called up a good friend who had been complaining about her website for a while. I asked her if it was hard to edit, I asked her if it was annoying that it didn’t look right on mobile, didn’t look good when shared on Facebook, etc. She said yes yes yes! All those things! I hate our website!

I asked her if I built a product that fixed those things would she buy it for $2,000? She said, “Absolutely!”

I called another friend and had the same conversation with the same results.

Two phone calls and two highly interested customers. I felt I was on to something. Now could I build what I was talking about?

Could I Actually Build it?

I wondered if I could really build my solution. I thought I could, but I wanted to be sure. My mission was to prove out the riskiest part of the business — that I could build an easy to use editor front end to the tech stack I was using. I saw the next Startup Weekend Lansing was in two days. I signed up, figuring the time constraint would give me the pressure I needed to code up a minimum viable product.

That weekend I didn’t get much sleep, but by Saturday night I’d created an easy to use editor that I could use right away for my own websites.

Now it was decision time. Should I sell something I haven’t actually built? What if it didn’t work well? What support issues overwhelmed me? Will my friend hate me if I fail? I remembered another lesson I learned from 4 Hour Work Week, and I thought about the worst thing that could possibly happen.

Then I realized what I’d do if everything totally failed.

I would apologize and refund my friend’s money!

Closing the Presale

I called my friend back and told her I had built an early version of the software to solve the problems we talked about last week. I told her I wanted to show it to her and have her sign a contract if she was still interested.

That Friday I had a signed contract in hand and my most successful startup to date.

Startup sales is about understanding customer problems and offering solutions. Most customers don’t care about how things work. They just want their problem solved. To buy from you they need to be confident you can solve their problem. That’s why it is easier to sell a product that exists, a customer can be shown here is the solution to your problem. Selling a solution before it exists is harder, but it can be done.

4 Steps for Product Presales:

1. Know the space you are working in. The options available, the pros and cons of the options, the price-points of those options, etc.
   I had 20 years of experience working in and understanding the web development space.
2. Talk with potential customers about their problems.
   I called potential clients who I thought had the problem I was describing and talked with them about it.
3. Create a plan in case you can’t deliver.
   I put aside my fears of failure by creating a worst case scenario plan, I would apologize and refund all their money.
4. Get commitment.
   I got a verbal purchase commitment at a specific price point for solving the problems we’d talked about before writing a line of code. After writing my prototype and showing it to the client I got a signed contract before building out the product.

Thanks to Rick Mason for reading an early draft of this.