(2024-02-24) Maurya Sell Before You Build

Ash Maurya: Sell before you build.

1 Universal Principle
“Sell before you build.”

2 Underlying Strategies at Play

I. Early adopters don’t buy working products; they buy a promise of better.

Think Demo-Sell-Build instead of Build-Demo-Sell.
This doesn’t just work for B2C products. Most high-ticket B2B products already utilize a multi-stage discovery-demo-close-pilot process. You don’t need a working product until the pilot — typically months away.

II. Use your demo to define the right product to build.
If you can’t sell the demo, why build a product no one wants? Instead, ask why. Fix your demo, sell it, and then build exactly that.

3 Actionable Tactics

I. Preorder Offer

Drive traffic to a landing page

• a. A Unique Value Proposition (UVP) or promise of better as the headline.
• b. A demo (like an explainer video) of how your product delivers this promise of better.
• c. A clear call-to-action to pre-order.

II. Crowdfunding Offer

place it on a crowdfunding platform (with a warm audience) within a time-boxed campaign (to drive urgency) and with a minimum funding goal (to test viability).

III. Mafia Offer

I prefer starting all my products with a high-touch founder-led mafia offer

I first

• a. Interview enough customers to understand their problems better than they do.
• b. Use these insights to design the right solution and assemble an offer (UVP + Demo + Price).
• c. Then, I sell my offer to 10 customers face-to-face. If they don’t want to buy, I get to why.