During the question and answer session my heart was in my throat since like any good marketer, my depth of knowledge was no more than one level away from being a complete idiot.
This is exactly why I have always thought that it was better for a technologist to learn marketing than for a marketer to learn technology. For any technology product, sooner or later you'll have to get more than one level deep.
The technology industry standard of salesperson supported by sales engineer has worked fairly well, but for a start-up, you should be able to talk to anyone about anything regarding your business.
It's unlikely that anyone else would demonstrate the same passion for your product than you. Sure, you could enlist help that will keep you at your terminal more often, but you'll still have to be your own first evangelist. Too much gets lost in translation any other way.
A good marketer is just as hard to find as a good engineer. And it's more than just knowing some subject matter. There's almost an instinct about it. Marketing isn't just like learning another programming language, it's like learning another discipline. It would be like being asked to learn psychology. Sure, your engineer could probably get a basic proficiency in a few months, but real skill comes from years of practice.
The best team is probably one of each, as a good engineer and a good marketer will both have their own strengths and know when to defer to the other for their weaknesses.
I'm responding purely to the title, here, because the meat of the article dealt with a slightly different situation than I have experience with.
After my last attempt at building a product, I'm going to be very careful to keep customers at arms length in the early stages. I fell into a trap where I had one big customer who was paying a disproportionate amount of my bills, and getting to close to them kept me from getting close to other customers (or potential customers). At some point, I effectively turned into an employee who just so happened to be paid as a vendor.
This seems like a natural trap to fall into when trying to bootstrap something. It's awfully hard to turn down revenue, making it easy to become basically a consultant to one particular master.
Your problem is not that you were depending too much on customerS. It was that you were depending completely on one customer.
I'm going to be very careful to keep customers at arms length in the early stages
That sounds like a very scary strategy to me. How do you plan to know if your product will be of use once built?
By all means, don't become a consultant to one customer. But you don't have to become a consultant in order to get valuable feedback from multiple customers that are representative of your larger target market.
That sounds like a very scary strategy to me. How do you plan to know if your product will be of use once built?
Well, you never really know, do you? In many cases, potential customers don't really know either. I basically know what I want, or think I want, and can build that. The goal is to build it quickly, watch people use it, and then adjust based on that.
I knew exactly what my one big customer, my 3 smaller customers, and a few potential customers wanted. I couldn't produce all of that, and erred towards producing what the people who were giving me the most money wanted.
The important goal (for me) is to have some buffer time where earning ze monies isn't a life or death problem, thus giving me the ability to insulate myself a bit from people who can give me money (you know, assuming it makes sense). "Arms length" doesn't mean I don't talk to people, and I don't spend time watching how they work. It means we're not financially linked right away.
That's a quote from the days when Joel Spolsky wrote really interesting stuff.
Before I tell you how we prioritized our list of
features, let me tell you two ways not to do it.
Number one. If you ever find yourself implementing a
feature simply because it has been promised to one
customer, RED DANGER LIGHTS should be going off in your
head. If you're doing things for one customer, you've
either got a loose cannon sales person, or you're slipping
dangerously down the slope towards consultingware.
This is exactly why I have always thought that it was better for a technologist to learn marketing than for a marketer to learn technology. For any technology product, sooner or later you'll have to get more than one level deep.
The technology industry standard of salesperson supported by sales engineer has worked fairly well, but for a start-up, you should be able to talk to anyone about anything regarding your business.
It's unlikely that anyone else would demonstrate the same passion for your product than you. Sure, you could enlist help that will keep you at your terminal more often, but you'll still have to be your own first evangelist. Too much gets lost in translation any other way.