Sales mistakes that software engineers make

Selling something that hasn't been built or planned yet. This leads to disappointed customers and/or rushed delivery of half assed features. This is easy for the sales persons to do and they tend to move on anyway before the shit hits the fan. Aldo, it's technically not their problem when the shit hits the fan.

Confusing what the customer says they want with what they actually need. This leads to wasted development effort building something that doesn't ultimately solve the customer's problem, that nobody else really wants. When sales people take charge of requirements, always question the rationale.

Giving into a big customer's demands to land a deal and thus crippling the company doing custom development for that one customer at a huge discount and at the cost of shipping value to other paying customers. I would say this is the #1 mistake in selling SAAS software. It's literally a company killer as often the customer is unhappy anyway and then cancels the deal. I've seen multiple startups get stranded doing all sorts of crap for a customer that ultimately walks away.

Listening to a customer that has not committed to paying. Before they pay, they are just haggling over details. They'll want everything you suggest and then some. After they pay, they've committed to you and then you can be reasonable about their demands. Especially in an early phase of a company everybody is interested in becoming a customer if only you were to do X, Y, And Z. You check back two weeks later they'll come up with more crap. It never ends and they may never buy something.

My recommendation is to always build an MVP and try to sell the MVP. If you can't sell the MVP, it's not viable. If it takes a long time to build it, it is not minimal. If you have no MVP you have nothing to sell. An MVP is not a click demo, it needs to be a functioning thing that delivers value to paying customers. Building it should be proportional to the amount of risk you are willing to take financially and the amount of money you are going to make if successful.

Of course definitely talk to potential customers as early as you can but don't promise anything you can't deliver.

After the MVP stage work with roadmaps and prioritize according to what is needed, feasible, and valuable. Most stuff customers want fails at least one of these tests. Most sales people are poor judges of feasibility or necessity.

The purpose of speaking to customers first before building is to find out how much demand there is for the product and how much they're willing to pay for.

It's to find out that there is really only one company or a few that want this... before possibly wasting your time building it.

If someone knowingly goes into building a product for a single customer, then that had better been a conscious decision, knowing the ramifications of that. Be aware of it and don't let it be something that just happens.

In any case, for engineers, speaking to customers before building is not the default. So there's a strategy that they are going out of their way to adopt, for a specific purpose. So they need to do it right, not half-assed, and design the app for a large number of users with input from a good amount of people, otherwise their single main customer who will have them by the balls.

The market researcher should go into it knowing that the user cannot always list out exactly what they want. Everything the market researcher should do is purposeful, to try to discover what that thing that needs to exist really is, how big the addressable market is, and for how much money the market will bear. It's a whole strategy... And it's a better strategy than building without working with real actionable data from a sample of the actual future users.

You use the term "investment" -- do you invest in stock market / bitcoin / real estate by buying whatever looks cool, and chalking up your losses to the learning process, or do you research your choices and look for ROI opportunities??

I think this is why the average age of entrepreneurs skews higher...because you get more experience and connections on who to talk to and what questions to ask. And this is why serial entrepreneurs succeed.

If you think of it as a software product standpoint. Once you have a team to build out the entire stack, your next software product would be easier. But the time it takes to find your UI person, backend, mobile, etc...takes time.

My inner circle of professionals are developers. If I wanted some dev resources I could. But when I meet certain people for the first time who don't know a lot of devs, they look at me like a unicorn.

My wife runs a small business/franchise. We were hoping to use that as a stepping stone for future, bigger businesses. There are lots of small business associations around us, Chamber of Commerce, etc. They would have some resources if you want to network.