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.