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I cannot tell you how many clients have come to Rampd after months, or even years, of struggling to pivot their business. My first question is always, “What took you so long to figure this out?”
Their typical response is, “I’m not sure,” or “I was uncertain if coaching could help with my product.”
Procrastination is the thief of all profits.
The common factor among nearly all of them was they decided to focus all their effort on building the “perfect” minimum viable product (MVP) before learning how to test their hypothesis. Unfortunately, this approach usually ends in a lot of burned cash and false hope.
In this issue, I will share the Rampd framework you can use to test your hypothesis before writing another line of code.
The framework discussed below will save you hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, in wasted cash, heartache, and pivot hell.
Unfortunately, I continue to see many founders do the opposite, mostly because they don’t understand how to sell or the idea of scaling something that does not yet exist seems baffling. Today we’re going to change that.
If You Build Before You Sell, It Will Lead To Higher CAC, Lower LTV, And Accelerate Burn Rates On Cash
If you haven’t read Peter Zhou’s (Co-Founder / CEO of Rutter) X thread on what he learned in pivot hell, I highly recommend it. You can read it here.
Let’s take a high level look at the framework we used to help clients test their hypotheses before focusing any more efforts on building.
Step 1: Discovery (qualification)
The purpose of a discovery call is to identify how they currently manage their workflow and, ideally, how they’d like to be managing their workflow. This is done through the BANT (budget, authority, need, timing) framework.
Step 2: Demo
The purpose of the demo is to take the needs/use cases they shared on the discovery and show them how your product can help solve them.
Step 3: Scoping Call
The goal of a scope is to understand what success criteria would look like at the end of a proof of concept (POC). In other words, what are they looking to validate with your technology before moving forward as a customer?
Step 4: Paid POC
The goal here is to validate that your technology can solve their needs/use cases.
Step 5: POC Recap
After the POC, you set up a call to recap their success criteria to identify whether you could achieve their objectives or not.
Step 6: Negotiation / Close
If you’ve achieved technical validation, then the next steps are negotiating on price, coming to an agreement, and closing the deal.
Here’s what the framework looks like at a high level.
Here’s a short list of benefits that will come from selling before building.
- You’ll keep burn rates low.
- You’ll identify a real market need faster.
- You can iterate and adjust the product a lot quicker.
- You’re getting paid to build rather than building to hopefully get paid.
- The feedback you get will be more impactful.
- Your early wins will help fund iterations.
That’s all I got for today.
See you next week!
Darren
P.S. Here’s the link to the flow chart above.
P.S.S. If you’re interested in booking an intro call, you can do so here
