Every stage of building a business demands a different maturity from the product. So, it would be futile to assume that we could always sell with a well-made slide deck and no real product to support it. However, the mindset about trying to gauge the pulse of the market before building anything is what we need to inculcate. How smartly can we figure out what our customers will pay for? Also, how can we figure out if we stop offering something, and will our customers continue to pay us?
At every stage of product building, we need to attempt to find the answers to both these questions, but our strategy to find these answers must evolve continually. For a well-matured product with a large customer base, it may not be possible to find out these answers merely by speaking to a few select customers (Chapter 11, Eliminate Waste – Data Versus Opinions, discusses the futility of doing this). However, we can introduce product feature teasers that can be rolled...