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.

Jamie Lewis' Keynote at DIDW and IdM Services

Phil Windley has a pretty lengthy post recapping Jamie Lewis' keynote at DIDW this year. He has some pics of some of Jamie's slides as well. (I always enjoy Jamie's 'status of the market' type slides...take a look at this one.) The interesting part was the claim that the market is moving from suites to services. I'm not sure I sense that in the market at all. Being on the floor, I haven't seen many - if any - IdM services being deployed. I have seen tons of traditional suite-type implementations. Each vendor is, of course, pushing hard to have their stack to be adopted and implemented, and usually with some level of success. Phil wraps this point up well (emphasis mine):

When we get to the point where there are services we can reuse, then we will see progress. There’s reason for hope. Emerging frameworks, like CardSpace, OSIS, Higgins, and Bandit promise to create an access layer.