"I don’t doubt that there might be a few hotel executives that are willing to bet on this, and sign up at this very early stage at a discounted price, but contrary to the belief of many others, this is really unlikely, and it’s not worth spending too much effort on considering the expected return."
Not worth the expected return? This sounds like a case of you wanting 'instant gratification' and to be making huge amounts of money from the start, which is bogus. With a few customers you will:
1. Be getting the use cases, bugs, feedback directly from your customers
2. Show you can get some funding and are building something people will pay for (or if they drop you, you'll understand why)
3. Have numbers, knowledge, and customer referrals which will VASTLY help getting more customers. I.e. when you are in the sales pitch, saying "X hotels have been using this for a year, and have generated Y additional sales, and have learned Z metrics about their hotel guests" etc.
As I mentioned in the article, being a solo-founder doesn't help.
There are two things I can do with my time.
1. I can go ahead and talk to as many hotels as I can, halting development. At this stage, there isn't even anything that is actually working. I have dealt with hotel sales before, finding decision makers, convincing them, etc. take a lot of time.
2. I can work on finishing the MVP (which is only room service).
Going with the first route, the expected return is way too small. Let's be optimistic, and say one in 30 hotel managers thinks this is super cool, and decides to pay for this thing way in advance. Talking to 30 hotels, arranging meetings, getting them to respond, etc. would take months.
Instead, I can get it to a point where I have an MVP that can be put in a hotel room, which can calculate the ROI it brings, which I can use to justify the cost of the product. This is the path I chose.
(I obviously talked to hospitality professionals to get their feedback, but I wasn't selling them.)
Not worth the expected return? This sounds like a case of you wanting 'instant gratification' and to be making huge amounts of money from the start, which is bogus. With a few customers you will:
1. Be getting the use cases, bugs, feedback directly from your customers
2. Show you can get some funding and are building something people will pay for (or if they drop you, you'll understand why)
3. Have numbers, knowledge, and customer referrals which will VASTLY help getting more customers. I.e. when you are in the sales pitch, saying "X hotels have been using this for a year, and have generated Y additional sales, and have learned Z metrics about their hotel guests" etc.