Sir Richard Branson once had to travel to the British Virgin Islands. The airline cancelled his flight because there weren't enough passengers. So, he hired a plane and wrote up on a blackboard the price of a one-way ticket to the British Virgin Islands. He went around selling tickets to the stranded passengers. This is how his airline business was launched.

Of course, it took much more investment, creativity, and business acumen to make a fully fledged airline business. However, selling tickets for the flight was the essential first step. To sell tickets, Sir Richard Branson didn't need to build his own plane. He didn't need elaborate props. A hired plane and a blackboard was enough. This was only because the sales proposition and the market need were compelling.

If we don't have a compelling solution to a market need, then it probably doesn't matter how well made our product is. Product building, therefore, needs to be as close as possible to market needs. We need to have a finger on the pulse of the market. We will explore more on this aspect in Chapter 11, Eliminate Waste – Data Versus Opinions. The metrics at this stage should drive what needs to be in the product.

Sales is one of the best ways to get a sense of what the customer is willing to pay for. It is a great way to arrive at our testable hypotheses. They tells us what is the most valuable part of the product that a customer is willing to pay for. Customer support, on the other hand, is our lens into adoption metrics. This tells us what the worst product experience is that a customer is willing to tolerate and still stay with us.

There is a reason strong enough for product teams (especially product managers) to get their hands dirty. They must sell and support the product. This does not mean that they accompany a sales person on a customer visit or look at customer support request queues. This calls for coming up with the sales pitch and driving a sales conversation with a potential customer. It also means supporting a customer when they raise issues with the product. It is this reality check that will ensure that the product teams keep their feet firmly on the ground.

Coming up with a sales pitch will help us find out what is the most compelling need of our customers. It will help us to identify which aspect of our product appeals to our customers and how our product excites or underwhelms them. It will help us to refine the value proposition to the very basics. Taking a founder's word, or a sales person's word, about what a customer wants isn't enough. We must get out of the building and find the answer for ourselves.

We also need to steel our hearts against finding out that our product isn't what our customers are willing to pay for. This insight is best derived when we haven't built much, so that a rework doesn't cost us or kill our business. Getting customer feedback early is the best part of selling. It is possible to sell without having a product. To sell, you just need a compelling solution to a pressing need. For eons now, religion had sold to us an idea that we can have a better afterlife if we pray and donate to religious causes. The afterlife isn't a product that exists. It exists only in our imagination (collective imagination, actually). Yet, so many people pray religiously and donate without question. Indeed, some amazing marketing and great influencers ensure that the idea of an afterlife is well propagated. It addresses a core emotional need for so many people; so much that they're willing to invest their time and money into a concept that has no evidence. Religion presents a compelling solution to what seems like a pressing need: we want to feel secure about what happens after death. After all, praying is a small investment to make in return for a great afterlife.

Without espousing, censuring, or condoning the strategy of religion, let's agree that selling an idea has been around for long enough now. Many months before my start-up was even set up, we had the chance to interact with many conference organizers, speakers, event sponsors, and regular conference attendees. We spent considerable time talking to every person in the events and conferences ecosystem. We tried to find out what problems they faced. What did they desire from a conference? How well did our product idea address their needs? We were able to glean patterns from the data that we had gathered by speaking to so many folks. Then, we spent a few days brainstorming about our end-to-end service design. We tried to figure out how our idea of a mobile app, that would serve as a digital agenda and networking and sponsorship medium, would fit into the ecosystem. The deciding factor for us was to figure out who was going to pay us for meeting their needs. Conference organizers and event sponsors were our biggest bets.

However, we had to test our hypothesis. So, instead of building a mobile app, we created a slick slide deck with wonderfully designed screens that highlighted the key features in the app. I'd like you to refer back to the discussion in Chapter 6, Manage the Scope of an Impact-Driven Product, about identifying the impactful product for a market where technology viability exists. In our case, the viability of building a mobile app already existed. What we had to test was whether event organizers would pay for such a solution, and, if so, how much they would be willing to pay; also, whether this amount would be enough to be a compelling proposition for us to pursue, to build a product at all. Our presentation deck had only well-designed screens of features, which we felt would get the conference organizers excited. We tried a combination of features and had different versions of the deck. We also came up with a baseline amount, which we thought the organizers would be willing to pay for such a product.

Armed with nothing but a flashy slide deck and glib talk, we set up meetings with potential customers. This deck and glib talk won us two customers who were ready to pay more than the baseline amount we had in mind. We learned an important lesson that there was a lot we could validate about our product without even having a product.

When we think of a service or a product, we tend to obsess about the service or product itself by asking: how do we improvise it? How do we make it stand apart from competitors? How do we make it appealing? What is the most impactful product to build?