SELL your VALUE before you CREATE it

This is a real story. Aravind was a very systems and process driven SAP consultant. He had worked with lots of MNCs in India as well as onsite locations. After working for more than 2 decades, he thought of starting on his own. He ventured in to an ERP development company. Even though his experience was of consulting and that too in SAP domain for corporate sector, he got in to ERP development for SME sector. As he started looking for business, he mostly got projects for development in Microsoft technologies. Though it was not his domain he started accepting those offers and built a team around those technologies just to survive. As time passed by he started building small products again based on Microsoft Technologies, hoping to sell the product licenses in bulk.

Revenue he was getting out of the projects was not sufficient to take care of the team he has built, at the same time he needed to have Products in place, he was in dilemma. He had to use all his savings of 2 decades in maintaining the team and completing the products he had planned.

After 2-3 months, Some how the products were ready. When they started talking to prospective customers, they understood that the products they have built are not products really, they are just features of a wannabe product and that too clients don’t really need it. His last hope was to sell those products to bigger Software Development Company to get at least the investments out, even that did not work out. At the end he had lost all the savings of his life time and had to close the business.

Learning from the Story

1. Always play on your strengths.
2. Do not let your business happen by the way, choose your clients and the work you want to do.
3. Create a minimum viable product based on your target customer segments problems and needs, offer them the minimum product and based on client feedback improve upon it continuously. Ie. Sell your value before you create it.
4. 90% of the startups fail because they create a product first and then try to sell it later.

Questions to ask our self

1. What is that minimum product I need to build based on my targets segment’s problems and needs?
2. What are must have features of my products for which my clients are ready to invest money on?
3. Do I really need to build even a minimum viable product or I can do with selling the concept to start with?
4. What are our strengths, are we really playing on our strengths?