[lusr]

It's not really a "Show HN", though is it? It's an paid-for extension of an existing product. In that vein, while an informative post I did find the following statement a bit disingenuous:

"As Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and partner at Y Combinator, says, the correct order of operations is to “sell before you build.” When you launch, you want a whole list of people that you can tell to buy it. But more than that, you want to ensure that you’re investing all that time building something that people want to buy."

As far as I can tell, they built a product for 40,000 people over a certain period of time without generating a cent in profit or knowing in advance that any of those people would ever consider paying from the product. While some users did claim they wanted a team version they would pay for, this was only after the base product was built without knowing people would pay for it.

This bugs me a bit because I'm working on a project where I'd love to be able to sell before I build, as it's obviously a very sound principle, but in practice I just can't see how to go about it and I was hoping to learn something new from this post.

[schnaars]

When we launched our company, we spent quite a bit of time identifying, based on the concept, who are the top 100-companies that we would like to do business with, who in the organization would buy this and how do we get to that person.

From there, we cold called / emailed like maniacs - 'here is what we are working on, here is the problem it will solve, here is why you need it, can we have 20-minutes of time to walk you through this?' We leveraged every possible network connection that we had.

When we got people on the phone, we actually showed them mocks of what their site would look like with our platform (lots of Photoshop). Explained that about how we wanted to get them in a beta program, and how much would they pay?

It was a ton of hustle, but we had 10-customers when we launched that were generating a little bit of revenue and willing to give us quotes in the press or get on stage at events.

It is more of a larger, enterprise sale, so it won't work for all companies, but we were essentially selling something that we were building in parallel and wouldn't accept free for an answer.

[mattmanser]

That comment jarred with me too, in reality what they did is the total antithesis of what Paul's quote embodies.

There are a few options for seeing if people will buy before you build. The often quoted one here (and it's also used in the Lean Startup as an example) is have a sales site, have a 'buy now button', but go through to a 'we're currently in beta, email me when it's ready'.

Then buy google ads or whatever your sales pipeline is and see if people click 'buy now'. If no-one does, you've got a problem.

If you've got a big ticket item, you can do something similar but be upfront that it's not built. Talk to clients, see if they want what you're thinking of making and suggest a price to see if they say yes. Again, if you can't find anyone to say yes, you've got a problem.

And for some projects, Kickstarter is another obvious method.

[jacquesm]

Sell before you build: you go through what you could automate by doing it by hand. Automation is optional. If you actually sell automation then that is of course impossible but if you sell a product that you could create by hand just as well as through a computer program then you can sell right away.

[icefox]

So whats your products?