#42: How To Find Buyers Before You Build

#42: How To Find Buyers Before You Build

Read time - 3.5 min

Big Announcement
Going forward, we will now run two founder-led sales cohorts concurrently. One will be focused on B2B mid-market/enterprise sales. The other will be focused on B2C / SMB transactional sales. We’ve made this decision as there is quite a difference in GTM sales motions in B2B and B2C. We are now onboarding founding teams for our next FLS B2B cohort, which will begin on March 6, and our B2C / SMB cohort will begin on March 28. 

These accelerators are filling up extremely fast, as we have limited spots and keep them very intimate. If you’re ready to level up, do not procrastinate. Go ahead and book a call with me here. 

Today, I will discuss how to find buyers before you continue to wrangle engineering resources to build.

This is a big one. What I typically see is the opposite. Founders will build a product they think the market wants, ship it, and try and find buyers. This IMO is not the right approach. I’ve seen countless numbers of founders who have run this playbook and blew up their companies.

If you look at some of the reviews from clients who have worked with Rampd, they will universally tell you that selling a product before you continue to build helped them keep burn at bay, find early indications of PMF, flesh out a repeatable sales process, and deliver a product the market wants.

Process + Repetition + Feedback = Closed Business.

~ Yours Truly

Staying on topic of this newsletter, I’ve attached a screenshot (below) of an email from a prospect on why they thought that timing was off, and why this was terrible advice.

Some context here is that this individual has built a compelling AI product with serious capabilities and investors. This individual closed $200k in ARR with no sales process or lead generation, and the revenue they managed to close had come from warm investor intros and other batchmate founders. None were on any type of agreement - it was all monthly recurring revenue, (MRR). Customers started churning, they hadn’t found indications of PMF, and their pipeline had dried up from their internal network, with no new leads coming in. I walked through our process and explained how we can help - they were super pumped, and then I received this email.

This is lazy advice, that I speculate came from one of their investors. Let me explain why this approach is fundamentally wrong and, in my opinion, is the leading cause of startups starting on a slippery slope of burn, anxiety, and disaster.

The goal of your pre-seed to seed journey should be to establish six things.

1. Build and iterate on your minimum viable product (MVP)

2. Find some indications of product market fit (PMF)

3. Close some business

4. Systematize lead gen

5. Systematize sales

6. Survive

In order to close early business, find indications of PMF, and survive, you have to have leads consistently coming in and a predictable process to walk them through

You want to find buyers before you build. Yes, you should have a (minimum viable product (MVP) built out. The idea is to begin pitching your idea of what your MVP is solving for (hypothesis). This is done through a qualification process where you’re asking prospects a specific set of questions to identify whether or not they have use cases that are applicable to what your MVP can solve. And if they’re not a good fit for you, you’re still collecting valuable information to help you determine which direction to move with the product.

You succeed by building out lead gen, testing different ICPs and messaging, and finding the direction the market is telling you to move. This is how you “perfect a product for a specific group of buyers.“  

Otherwise, you burn cash and wrangle engineering resources to build based on speculation and “what you think.” What I have seen work time and time again is moving in the direction the market is telling you to move by actively building out a sales go-to-market (GTM) and asking people to buy your product.

This allows you to do two things. (1) Close revenue. And (2) collect the data on different use cases who didn’t buy, and use that information to make the necessary iterations on the backend. That’s building on accurate data, not hypotheticals. 

That’s it for today, folks.

See you all next week!

Darren


P.S. If you’re ready to level up, you can book a call with me here.