Sell-Driven Development

The creator of COM once told me: “software works if someone will buy it.”

Yesterday I was listening to Episode 28 of The Startup Success Podcast, and guest Sramana Mitra emphasized startups should Sell-Design-Build-Sell.

A sensible plan for a startup might look like this:

1. Think of an idea for something people might buy.
2. Design it.
3. Build it.
4. Sell it.
5. Go to step one.

There’s nothing wrong with this plan: To be successful you must complete all of these steps. But the plan is very inefficient. As engineers, we can almost subconsciously filter out things that we can’t build, but we don’t have any intuition about marketing and sales. As a result we invest a lot of energy in designing and building things that turn out to be difficult to sell, and we go back to step one not richer but poorer.

Consider this: You wouldn’t write all of your software before you test any of it. The stuff you write will turn out to be crap because it doesn’t do what you wanted it to do and you will have to rework it to get it right. If things go really badly, you may have to throw it all out and try something else. So you don’t do that. Instead, you test your software as soon as you can.

But remember, software works if someone will buy it. And you can find out if someone will buy your software very easily—pick up the phone, or open your email client, and ask them. That’s what Sell-Design-Build-Sell does:

1. Think of an idea for something people might buy.
2. Find some people willing to buy it.
   • If nobody is willing to buy it, go back to step one.
   • Otherwise go to step three.
3. Design it.
4. Build it.
5. Call the people from step two back, and sell it to them.
6. Go to step one.

I’ve also made the bitter realization that I’ve heard Sell-Design-Build-Sell somewhere before: Three years ago, listening to Greg Gianforte’s advice on bootstrapping and reading his book. Three years!

Tomorrow I’m going to outline what I’m working on. Then I’ll send this to some potential customers and ask them if they would buy it.