Words of Wisdom: Sell Early

Phil Windley has a fantastic post giving good startup advice. The basic idea is, don't wait to sell your product/service. Never wait until its "ready", because chances are, you'll never think its really ready. An eye opening point he makes is that selling to customers and speaking with them helped him up his pitch-game more than talking to VCs and raising capital.

As a consequence of all this, I wish we’d been positioned to start selling well before we started raising money. Unfortunately, because of various timing issues and our own understanding, things didn’t work out that way. If I do this again, I’ll start selling much earlier.

A question that pops into my head: is there a point where you are just too raw to go out there with your product. I suppose there is an inverse relationship between how ready your app is and the patience (and free-time) of your first customers. Anyhow, keep 'em coming, Phil.

The Worst IdM Product Review Article. Ever.

A product review should...umm...review the product. Talk about the features, where it shines, where it doesn't, etc. This one in specific is just really, really bad. (I'm not saying anything against the product, just the review.) Here are a few nuggets:

The P Synch package performs the single sign-on component of identity management. The ID Synch package is primarily a web-based package that uses SSL for protecting the data during transmission.

...now that is just wrong info.

The web-based configuration of the M-Tech product suites felt intuitive and easy to understand. For example, each of the major headings in the menus reflected commonly used terms in the field of identity management.

...?

The PDF files are large and a more advanced search function could also help speed the reader’s search to find the correct passage.

...are you listening adobe?

Apologies for the sarcasm this morning.