Taking a Product to Market? Harden Your Sales Funnel First

Selling involves more than a landing page and credit-card form

For more than 20 years, I’ve been bringing new products to market. I’ve taken new product ideas to launch, through product-market fit, to traction, growth and ultimately success — sometimes failure, but my track record is pretty good and I always learn from my mistakes.

Almost always.

Along the way, I’ve also been paid a lot of money to advise dozens of other startups to do the same. Most of them, not all of them, come to me when they’re in trouble. They come to me for help with their feature set, their pricing, their marketing and their sales. They come to me because none of it seems to be working.

In these situations, I can’t wave a magic wand and fix it. I wish I could. But most of the time it’s due to a poorly built go-to-market foundation, sometimes even a lack of any foundation.

This is going to seem surprising, but the simple step I see skipped almost every time a startup fails to find product market fit is when the startup creates grand plans for dominating their market without any sort of plan to make the product available to the market.