Sell the feature before you build it

How can you get paid before risking time and money developing

Photo by Jovyn Chamb on Unsplash

So yeah, the Taj Mahal works. I mean, it pulls in almost 10 million visitors annually, not bad considering that Magic Kingdom, the world’s number one park, pulls in about 20 million visitors, and they have Splash Mountain on their side.

But at what cost?

The Taj Mahal was built over the course of 21(!!!) years, employing 20,000 workers at a whopping cost which today would have been approximately a BILLION dollars.

Now wouldn’t it have sucked for the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan if it would have been just OK? If after 21 years, people would come and peek at it and go “meh”?

If you build it, they will come. -Kevin Costner

In the 1989 film “Field of Dreams”, some random dude builds a baseball field in the middle of nowhere and everything turns out awesome (sorry for the spoiler).

And that’s what popular culture has us believe.

You are awesome, brilliant, inventive and beautiful. If you build your idea, and you are TRUE to your vision and dreams, the world will come around and your creation will overwhelm the world.

I’ve built it, why is no one coming?

We’ve all been there, building what we thought would be our Taj Mahal. We’ve all built something that was amazing and got an underwhelming reception - that school play you worked on for months to get a standing ovation from your mom and no one else, that website that should have changed the internet, that blog post that should have spread like wild-fire.

For me, it was SaaS software which was brilliant and… was never adopted.

And if you’re that one person, that invested heavily and it worked, congratulations, stop reading. You should probably fill out a lottery ticket as well since you’re luckier than the rest of us.

For the rest of us, maybe you should keep reading just a bit more.

So you say I should first find out if they are coming and then build it?

Yes!

Yes! Yes! Yes!

If you’re opening a restaurant, wouldn’t you rather have a people pre-buy dinner and have a six-month waiting list before you open your doors?

If you’re writing an e-book, wouldn’t you rather start typing when 10,000 people have already prepaid for it on your crowdfunding campaign?

If you’re programming your next feature on your SaaS page, wouldn’t you rather have hundreds of clients committing to an upsell before you write that first line of code?

Of course, it’s so simple!

No, it’s really hard, you’re right. I didn’t mean to make light of it.

But you know what’s harder? Wasting all your time building something that no-one uses. That cracking sound you hear in the background, that’s my heartbreak from all those unutilized creations gathering dust while I wait for the masses.

So to recap - selling before you build is REALLY hard, but it’s better than the alternative - building something that doesn’t sell at all.

But wait, there’s more!

If you think about it, most people commit to buying after sampling a product, not after using it heavily.

The first time you go to a restaurant you’ve never actually eaten there. You might have heard about it from a friend, the news or just walked by when it was packed and got curious.

You buy the e-book after reading about it, not after reading it.

You agree to give your credit card to a SaaS solution to try the freemium trial after you were convinced by their landing page.

Now here’s what’s going to change your perspective - After you’ve created whatever it is you’ve created, that restaurant, that e-book, that software, you still need to do all that marketing and sales, you’ve just put it off for some strange reason until after you’ve built the product.

So how do I do it the right way?

First of all, step back and take a breath.

You’re a fixer, a do-er, a builder. That’s your greatest strength, but right now, that’s your biggest weakness. Your fingers are itching to get started - you want to solve the problem that EVERYONE has.

Now imagine you are done building

Make a mental image of how it would feel like the day after you’ve completed your project. Imagine the details, the look, the users, the clients, the influencers who would love it, the use cases.

Do you have a visual of that completed project?

Good!

Remember the funnel

Try to remember yourself as a client, think back to the last time you committed to buying something, then go back even further and visualize what led you there.

You don’t just randomly try every product out there, read every book you hear about and eat at every restaurant that opens its doors.

In the beginning, I need to convince you somehow to give me 3-5 seconds:

“Vegetarian sushi near me? Cool!”

“Marketing for digital channels? I need to know more about that!”

“Time tracking app for entrepreneurs? Sounds like something useful!”

Now you have 30 seconds of my time - I’ll look at the menu, read the jacket of the book or browse the landing page.

What’s interesting about all these things, is that you don’t actually need a product - not a restaurant, nor a book, or a SaaS product.

I just need the marketing and sales material for the future product, so why not start there?

So how can I sell before I have anything to sell

That’s easy!

If you’ve got your clients to the point where they would buy the product if it existed (AKA the hard part), now pre-selling is super simple.

If it’s an e-book, there are a million ways to do a presale (Kickstarter, Gumroad and many more). You can even use the window of opportunity effect to drive sales with a discount for a limited amount of time.

If it’s a physical product like a restaurant, event or show, do a presale of tickets. You buy concert tickets for your favorite artists months in advance. You can sell your chili bake-off before renting the space, just commit to the neighborhood and date and then rent the venue after you’ve sold enough tickets to support it.

If it’s a software product it’s even easier. Pay a designer to make an AMAZING mockup (using Figma or Invision to name a few) and make a “walkthrough” video of you “using” the product or feature. Then market this to your users and create a waiting list. If it’s a long-awaited feature, ask them to put their payment details to show that they are serious in order to join the waiting list.

Final thoughts

Usually, you can find a creative way to convince someone to buy your product before it exists. If you show me the value of something, I’ll usually commit to buying it even before I can hold it in my hands - that’s how every purchase that isn’t instantaneous works. I’ll buy something on Amazon and wait for a couple of days until I get it.

The coolest thing about selling before creating is that if you can’t sell, for whatever reason, you don’t know how to reach the market or maybe they just don’t want what you envisioned in your head, you don’t have to waste time building anything.

Do you have any thoughts or questions?

Have you tried this technique and have feedback?

Please comment, I’d love to hear from you!