In my experience, technical people latently believe the thing that people buy from you is a product. So if the product isn't done / ready / etc, then you are being misleading trying to "sell" them or engage with them. It feels wrong, like you're forced to misrepresent yourself.
You imagine the potential buyer as a hyper-critical power-user that will expect everything to be perfect.
But what if the above isn't true at all? What if the potential buyer is buying something more abstract? Like a solution to a problem; or even the chance at future resolution of a painful problem?
And what if they aren't power users? But just need basic help today that could grow into something better tomorrow?
Like, what if they just need a partner to help them solve a painful part of their work, and would be willing to put up with a lot of incomplete stuff to get that?
In that case, reaching out to them to "sell" them in the early days is basically saying "Hey, I'm starting to build XYZ that solves problem ABC. My goal is that it would help by doing DEF. Do you have that problem? I'm early on in the process, and looking for lots of feedback from potential users. Would you be interested in checking out my prototype / designs / thinking on this?"
That doesn't seem "soul-wrenching" or disingenuous or anything like that. It feels very authentic. You're making yourself somewhat vulnerable and portraying yourself as eager to learn and help.
IMO early stage entrepreneurship consists of finding a problem bad enough that non-trivial amount of people say "sure, let's talk" to that pitch and then working with those early users to build something useful.
This shift in perspective has been critical for me. Similarly, it is critical to ask “Whose problem am I solving?”
I am an engineer and tinkering with tech brings me pleasure from creating, I crave mental stimulation, and I get immense satisfaction from havingright things in right places”. Polishing the code is like polishing the car engine for a petrolhead.
But those are my problems and triggers. I am feeding _my_ needs, then implicitly expect other people to give me _their_ money for doing this. Because look how hard I toiled! Yet many people do not care how polished their car engine is. And I have never seen clean code that was generating revenue.
The critical shift was to accept that people and have needs I don’t have, and they are desperate to solve them. And their professional lives are often painful - I get frustrated when I spend a day with almost any professional outside of tech. “This is the shit you have to put up with to get anything done??!” I haven’t had that problem since teens, if ever, and I can fix it. Automatically, empathy takes over, and I want to rescue them from the daily dread. So I wire together a minimal app that will make them glow with delight for 6 months, and they’ll give me dollars in return. Today was a good day, because two strangers supported each other and did not focus entirely on themselves.
If it were up to me, everyone would get a juicy steak. But when going fishing it’s more effective to bring worms.
This is a very clear articulation of my professional experience as well. I feel like I have to drop out of "aesthetic perfection" mode in order to just do what I can to help someone else; and and that is what they will actually pay for, since they don't care about the perfection of fine details.
IMO early stage entrepreneurship consists of finding a problem bad enough that non-trivial amount of people say "sure, let's talk" to that pitch and then working with those early users to build something useful.
This is hard for a certain class of problems, though- ones where people have to be convinced that the (1) there is a problem and (2) they should care about doing something about it. The first (modern) electric cars and the first home computers come to mind.
But that's really just a nitpick. I believe your point overall is correct- you're selling a solution or a dream.
This has been my perspective. It surprises me how many people (including non-technical people) have a problem with simply going “hey I’m working on solving this problem. Would you be interested in giving me some feedback?”. Or even the less forthcoming and more morally ambiguous pretend that the product exists/is being built. don’t build anything yet. seek idea feedback from potential users. maybe even grow the community first. only actually build the product once you have enough data to show that people actually want it. invite the most vocal people to use it first. when ready to launch, launch with actual users on day one
I’ve worked with “seasoned” business experts, MBA’s who run multimillion dollar companies themselves, etc, who had a problem with this just out of principal. I once put up a website for a personal startup project with a “give us your email and we’ll send you the white paper” form — and the white paper didn’t exist (although the raw data that would be used to produce the paper did). When one of my mentors who was examining the website wanted to see the white paper, and I said “it doesn’t exist (yet), I just want people to show me that they are interested in it, otherwise this project is not really solving a big enough problem. So far nobody has requested to see it.”... they were LIVID. They could never trust me again after that, even after I tried to explain the reasoning.
So what if the first person asks for it and it takes a day or two to arrive? If only one person ever asks for it, it’s not a big enough problem anyway. But the mentor was seeing it from the perspective of how it would look if they did that in their multi-million-dollar company with their fortune 100 clients. But their rules did not apply for my situation. My situation was that I don’t even have a profitable company with customers. That I want to build things that people want, and the sooner I can figure out it’s not worth pursuing, the sooner I can move on to other ventures. So if during this journey I create a white-paper request button, and nobody ever clicks it, did it even exist?
You imagine the potential buyer as a hyper-critical power-user that will expect everything to be perfect.
But what if the above isn't true at all? What if the potential buyer is buying something more abstract? Like a solution to a problem; or even the chance at future resolution of a painful problem?
And what if they aren't power users? But just need basic help today that could grow into something better tomorrow?
Like, what if they just need a partner to help them solve a painful part of their work, and would be willing to put up with a lot of incomplete stuff to get that?
In that case, reaching out to them to "sell" them in the early days is basically saying "Hey, I'm starting to build XYZ that solves problem ABC. My goal is that it would help by doing DEF. Do you have that problem? I'm early on in the process, and looking for lots of feedback from potential users. Would you be interested in checking out my prototype / designs / thinking on this?"
That doesn't seem "soul-wrenching" or disingenuous or anything like that. It feels very authentic. You're making yourself somewhat vulnerable and portraying yourself as eager to learn and help.
IMO early stage entrepreneurship consists of finding a problem bad enough that non-trivial amount of people say "sure, let's talk" to that pitch and then working with those early users to build something useful.