> Some things don't change though. You need to find customers before you find (ie build) product. Ideally you get a deposit before you start writing. Getting customers is harder than writing code, so do that first.
To add to this, there's always a catch 22 problem - how can I show something to customers to sell to, when I don't even have a product to sell? It's expected in a sales meeting or often any meeting, that you have a demo that would show your product concept for them.
I can't state this enough, but literally build on the shoulders of giants. Build on existing tools, and I don't mean open source, but existing products. Best advice I got from watching one of those AI fad-chasing YouTubers. Is it an online store idea? Build on Shopify first. Is it a chatbot? Use KoreAI or DialogCX. Is it a CRUD app? Use Glide + Google Sheets. Customer Service? Maybe they just need a Hubspot/Zendesk with some custom integrations.
Most customers are looking to buy a functionality, not a "product" . Oftentimes your MVP will be enough to carry them for a long time. You wouldn't even need to write a single line of code yourself for quite a bit of time.
Like you said, the hard part is actually meeting the potential prospect and ensuring that they will pay you for the product. In my (very limited) experience, I've had 60k-employee billion dollar companies outright refuse to buy (instead hiring 2000 underpaid fresh graduates in India to build a worse product), while a 250-employee million dollar company being super-enthusiastic about paying a premium price for it (even though they have their own dev team). If I had gone by the views of the billion dollar company, I wouldn't have found a market niche for my product, but fortunately I stubbed my toe (literally!) and found the actual customer instead.
Well it's a nine-figure insurance company, but I've also built for their competition which is a mid-eight figures company. Both are non-US publicly traded entities.
The other 60k employee company is a company that does as much in net profit as the market cap of the first company.
To add to this, there's always a catch 22 problem - how can I show something to customers to sell to, when I don't even have a product to sell? It's expected in a sales meeting or often any meeting, that you have a demo that would show your product concept for them.
I can't state this enough, but literally build on the shoulders of giants. Build on existing tools, and I don't mean open source, but existing products. Best advice I got from watching one of those AI fad-chasing YouTubers. Is it an online store idea? Build on Shopify first. Is it a chatbot? Use KoreAI or DialogCX. Is it a CRUD app? Use Glide + Google Sheets. Customer Service? Maybe they just need a Hubspot/Zendesk with some custom integrations.
Most customers are looking to buy a functionality, not a "product" . Oftentimes your MVP will be enough to carry them for a long time. You wouldn't even need to write a single line of code yourself for quite a bit of time.
Like you said, the hard part is actually meeting the potential prospect and ensuring that they will pay you for the product. In my (very limited) experience, I've had 60k-employee billion dollar companies outright refuse to buy (instead hiring 2000 underpaid fresh graduates in India to build a worse product), while a 250-employee million dollar company being super-enthusiastic about paying a premium price for it (even though they have their own dev team). If I had gone by the views of the billion dollar company, I wouldn't have found a market niche for my product, but fortunately I stubbed my toe (literally!) and found the actual customer instead.