Don't Overcommit to Customers
Be honest about what you have today
Many startups make hopeful promises to prospects. When the prospects asks if they have a feature they don’t, they say yes, hoping to build it by the time the sales process finishes, which can take a couple of months for B2B.
This doesn’t work, for the simple reason that timelines are not predictable. And why aren’t they? Because when we embark on a project, we typically have a woolly idea of what we want. We discover it incrementally as we go along, reaching full clarity only after finishing the project. Even if one person has a clear goal, others don’t. Or they have conflicting goals. Even if all stakeholders had clear and concordant goals, you typically don’t know the scope of the project needed to achieve those goals, such as how many features to build. Or the quality at which you need to build them. Even if you do, when you launch, you’ll find that users want something different from what internal stakeholders thought. As the saying goes, no plan survives contact with the enemy. On top of that, you don’t know what other initiatives you have (some of them will start midway through your project) or how much time they’ll take. Team members may quit.
With so many critical factors that are unknown, you should be pleasantly surprised when a project is done on time, rather than taking it for granted. It’s like dropping a coin from a plane and have your friend stand on the ground with a bucket to catch it. It’s not like running to where a ball will land and catching it. That’s why trying to predict timelines and make commitments to customers1 based on them will blow up in your face. The only winning move is not to play this game.
Moving on from the practical aspect, overcommitting to customers is basically lying, and therefore unethical. I’ve seen both companies and founders’ reputations ruined. I’ve seen customers so pissed they’ll tell anyone who asks not to touch the startup or the founder again with a ten-foot pole. I’ve seen lawsuits filed.
I do things differently: I try to conduct myself in a way that increases rather than decreases people’s trust in me as time goes by. I never sell my credibility. I want my reputation to grow rather than catch up with me in a bad way as the years go by. For example, in meetings with prospects, I don’t lie. And that includes lying by omission, such as remaining silent when other stakeholders are makes promises to customers that fall in, or overlap, my area of responsibility.
I don’t believe in Fake it till you make it. That’s like selling a fake iPhone. Even if you use the money to build a real product, that’s not right by the people who’ve been cheated. I believe in Believe in yourself till you make it. Don’t lie to others externally, but believe in yourself internally.
In summary, overcommitting to customers based on hope doesn’t work either practically, when the committed date comes and the product isn’t there, or ethically.
Does that mean you should build in secret and then sell? No!
I personally am okay with setting up a fake web site with a Sign Up button to gauge interest before building the product. That’s the only way to do that — people react to hypothetical questions like Would you buy a product that does XYZ? differently from real questions like Would you buy this product that does XYZ?
It’s also fine, and in fact a great idea, to iterate with customers at the level of UX prototypes: you can bang them out 10x faster than a real product. You can diverge and create multiple different prototypes to find out which one works best. You can iterate faster: if you need 20 iterations, and each iteration takes a day, you’ve finished them in a month to identify a winning product. But if each iteration takes a fortnight, you’ve taken close to a year. Just be honest and admit that the prototype you’re showing them is a prototype and that you haven’t built the product yet.
Or even disclose them, because customers take it as a commitment.