Let’s talk about why this is a huge mistake and I’ll share an example with you from the consumers perspective to prove to you that YOU are already doing this so you know that it works.
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Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here and today what I wanna talk to you about is if you want to be successful building a B2B SaaS business, you have to get comfortable with something that most people are uncomfortable with, and that’s selling, in particular, selling before you build, which adds potentially another layer of insecurity for folks who are afraid to find out that their baby is ugly.
Now, I understand that that sounds harsh, but this is really important information for you to know. It can create this unstoppable snowball effect if you wind up building something that ends up being a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. And that’s what I see a lot with people who want to get involved in SaaS.
They build a product based on idea. They have not a validated concept or a problem worth solving. Before you know it, you are continually chasing your tail. Find someone to give this software away to, and that’s not what you’re trying to do. So you need to get comfortable with this concept of selling, in particular, selling very early on, which is one of the first most important tests you can run to measure the relative strength of your proposed value proposition.
Right now, a lot of that. Should lead you to understand that this is very early days, so that’s why we’re doing the testing. If we’re doing that testing early on, then we’ll have an idea whether or not you’re onto something, because I don’t want you enter those later stages, which suck up so much time, energy, resources, and putting you on a path that’s hard to get off if you begin building.
Before you do any of that or make any of those investments, I want you to have a better understanding in the direction that you’re thinking of heading into potential that it has. So, What is an example of doing something like that? Well, I’m gonna skip over entirely what it looks like doing for an actual assessed business, and I’m gonna share something that’s probably more relatable for you.
Think about it in terms of going to a restaurant with friends or family, right? One of the pushbacks that I get whenever I am telling people that they need to do this is I can’t sell my product unless I have my product. How’s anyone gonna believe me or someone needs to experience it in order to really understand.
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And I wanna tell you that’s a hundred percent wrong. And trust me, I’ve been there. But having done this time and time again, I know that that’s wrong. And let me explain it to you. I’m gonna explain it to you in a way that will help you understand that it’s wrong as well, because you don’t do it either.
In fact, from the other side, right? As the consumer is someone who’s making purchasing decisions, you don’t need to see access to the product either. So here’s the concept that I’ve come up with most recently, and it’s in a restaurant setting. . So if you’re with your friends, family, a date, whatever, and you’re getting ready to order, right?
What do you have in order to make that purchasing decision? When you’re talking to the waiter or the waitress and you’re getting ready to order whatever, lasagna, spaghetti, sometime, some type of food, right? A burger. It doesn’t matter what it is, right? You’re getting ready to order. What do you have available at your disposal to make that purchasing?
Do you ask the waiter or waitress to wheel out for you the completed meal so that you can see it and then decide whether or not you wanna buy it? No. Right. That sound, that concept almost sounds ridiculous. That’s just not how it works. You look at a menu, you interpret the description for what it is that you want to.
Potentially purchase what you want to have for dinner. You optionally see a price there as well too, right? More commonly. So we, we know that as well, so that we understand like what’s within our budget, right? What do we wanna spend? What are we gonna buy? What do we wanna spend? And based on the description, does that sound like something that we want to have?
And that is all the information that you need in order to make a purchase decision. And you might have a question or two, right? How does that get handled? Well, a waiter or waitress is right there to answer your questions for you, right? And the equivalent of that can be. . Basically customer service for your SaaS application or an FAQ on a landing page, right?
Regardless if you have more questions before you need to make a decision, most of them are not, let me see the food before I buy it. , right? So you are more than capable and you do this all the time. That isn’t the only example. Everyone does this all the time, making purchasing decisions based on something that they want to or need without actually experiencing or seeing the product for themselves.
as such. I want you to think about that in terms of how you can leverage that strategy to potentially sell your SaaS product idea and do some early stage testing, which will help you validate the respective strength of that early stage value proposition to know whether or not you should ultimately move forward with potentially building it.
If you can’t sell it, then you shouldn’t build it.