| 4 years of consulting experience here with a similar situation to yours. Step 5 is elusive and almost impossible. Lost 2 products to the services mindset with further strain by partners to bring in capital by doing services. The chicken-egg issue becomes much harder when you are working hand to mouth. The problem roots from 2 main things, services/consultation mindset and in-consistent projects. The people who outsource or consult other teams to build their solutions start with a bidding process which inherently means that the cheaper and faster the better. This sole focus on cheap/fast is fun at the start as you become creative to work with tight deadlines and I atleast started doing more automation than ever before but can be useless considering how varying the projects are in nature and how the clients sole motivation is to be cheap & fast. This results in repetitive unchallenging work which is highly demotivating. Inconsistent Projects. Our first year we landed a huge chain of projects from a massive global brand giving us enough capital to last a couple of years. But with clients there is no guarantee, we couldn't display most projects we did in the first 2 years cause their launches were delayed and NDAs were signed which means nothing to show as portfolio of big names. Finally when we could, most of our project contacts were going dry meaning more inconsistency. For your question of sales, we had business developers who would get commission for each project who would spam companies to get us in the door. Mainly marketing agencies or contractors who would sub-contract us projects. The only reason we could get a lot of projects was because one of our business dev was an industry veteran wanting to do exactly what we were doing and we worked together though giving up high margins. If your end goal is to build products, i would recommend go straight with a product. Find something you love to build, take out weekends for it with your team and try to get it into an accelerator for more advice/exposure. |