When should we start selling?

Bizzman

Hi there,

I am currently setting up a software solution for the hospitality sector with two colleagues. I've been working on this for the past two years on and off and only in the last 8 months or so has the momentum picked up.

We're currently working on the design and development of the solution and have approximately 50% completed. We are scheduled to finish both design and development at end of August. We have a question however...when should we start selling this concept to our potential customers?

Without giving too much away our revenue model is based around commission and will not be a subscription model. Therefore the risk for the customer has been eliminated. We have some issues that we need to sort in relation to contractual agreements with our customers. This may not be completed for a number of weeks.

We have been receiving conflicting advice in relation to when we should be going out to our customers. The dilemma is:

A - Target Our Customers Now
Essentially, we will be setting up meetings with potential customers building up relationships with them prior to us launching this service in the market. We will be showing customers mock-ups of our software and asking them to sign up. We will then inform them by email when we are ready to go live.

This will be done without a fully functional platform and terms of contract that we still haven't decided on. The thought process behind this is that it would be half a marketing research expedition and half a sales pitch. At least if we receive some feedback on how we could improve the software further it would be a lot easier to do it at this stage rather than a month or so down the line.

B - Wait until software is ready and then target customers
We have also been advised that we should wait until our software is fully functional and the legal arrangements are in place before targeting customers. This is to ensure that we can approach our customers in confidence with a 100% ready product. This will take a month or so before we can do this, all going well.

Apologies for not giving too much away about our product. We would appreciate any advice. What would you do in this situation? Thank you.

EIREHotspur

I am developing a software solution for a different sector and I am going with B.

Software is a hard sell with all the competition out there.
Also trying to answer questions on devils advocate kind of queries without being able to demonstrate to convince people will see you come unstuck very quickly.

With software solutions, so much can go wrong and if your pitch goes wrong then thats your first impression pretty much frigged.
Have you never watched Dragon's Den??

Bizzman

Thanks for your reply EireHotspur. I understand what you are saying. That would be my own personal opinion as well but my colleagues are of the mind that we should be getting our name out there to potential customers, get some advice as well as selling to them at the same time.

I would like to hear what others think about this. Thanks again for your help.