Launching a new venture is both exhilarating and anxiety inducing all at once. The exhilaration of believing you’ve hit a Eureka moment and the faith that droves of people will see the light is the driving force in launching a new business for many. If that’s you and it’s day 1, now what? The temptation for most is to go into build mode, spend time, money and energy bringing a vision to light. This is where anxiety starts to set in as funding the initiative starts to creep into your thoughts. How is this all going to come together? For first time founders, building right away is probably the biggest mistake they will make as they set their funding anxieties aside because the intoxication of the eureka moment drives them forward.

The truth is, there’s no reason to go into build mode right away. In fact, one of the most impactful initiatives a new founder with a great idea can start is an outbound motion that helps understand how an idea can be packaged, sold, at what price and who are the right stakeholders that become involved in a sales process. Those who have traveled the road of launching a new business will understand that our initial assumptions about the value future clients will extract and how they will buy and how they will consume our products are almost always wrong. 

Launching outbound campaigns can, in a relatively short amount of time, help us understand and correct our assumptions about what value our product will have for our buyers, who those buyers are (ICP) and is our product best peddled through social channels, sales people, email, web, etc? Having a clearer understanding of these things should feed how you build out a product. This is key. The building out of a product addresses the risk in supplying a solution, and the selling/marketing addresses the risk in creating demand. What is being suggested here, is that an outbound motion not only helps the demand risk, but also helps inform the supply risk. Addressing the demand risk upfront, ensures that when you have a product to sell that you’re able to sell it, whereas having a product to sell without being able to sell it is a real problem. Here’s a recent example of things gone wrong when you build first and outbound after.

Initial research was done on a new product targeting product management workflows. Research indicated that there was a pain point in rounding up customer feedback and finding out the patterns that would help drive prioritization on a roadmap. Almost all product managers felt that having direct access to customer feedback and a mechanism for sorting that feedback into actionable patterns would indeed help their productivity. A multi year long build and collection of feedback on a solution began with enough ‘pilot customers’ trying out various builds to continue to feed a narrative for the founders that there is a solution that will sell into the assumed ICP. After landing on an iteration the founders felt was ready to sell, outbound campaigns began and the result was very revealing. First, the assumed ICP, ‘product managers’, was not going to work. They didn’t have the types of budgets, nor the real motivation to spend the type of dollars being asked. This would have easily been caught earlier if asking to pay was part of the ‘pilot’ conversation.

Further to that, they were too low on the food chain to make decisions. Once a more realistic ICP was found, CPO or COO, it became clear that they would compare the tool to other ‘product management’ tools which all had really low entry pricing and had PLG strategies. The iteration being promoted however was intended to be sold through an outbound sales team, and didn’t have the packaging to support a self serve/PLG type product. Lastly, the value derived from the tool wasn’t entirely clear. The outbound campaigns launched taught the founders that a) the product needed to be designed as a PLG type product as contract values couldn’t support a sales led motion. B) It taught the founders that the problem the tool was solving was a nice to have and in times of financial tightening, an unnecessary expense. Roadmaps which emerged as key to the value value chain, were still being created with or without the tool. 

At the end of the day, the learnings extracted here could all have been learned had the outbound campaigns launched sooner and difficult questions asked upfront. That would have led to very different decisions on the product design to a) speak more clearly on ‘roadmapping’, b) that it could be sold easily as a self serve product and that c) staffing was more about community building and growth hacking to drive increased sales. It also became really helpful for the founders to take their learnings and extend what the business may look like in the future. Having learned that contract values would be lower than expected and running self serve industry stats, the founders were able to assess whether the type of business that could be built is something they want to operate.

All of those learnings came through outbound campaigns and did not require a product to have been built. Screen shots and a clickable prototype would have served the same purpose and would have saved years worth of effort and money. Founders would have found their ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), how painful the problem being solved was by understanding how much people would pay to solve it and where potential customers would apply the product in their workflows.