Who’s On Phirst

About a month ago I had a conversation with the President of a professional services firm about what was more important to succeed in the market: a good product or a good sales team. Since his background was sales, and mine was in building products, you can probably guess which sides we fell on. The conversation turned into one of those Star Wars vs. Star Trek debates where neither of us could move the other, and we just agreed to disagree.

Which is all well and good, but I have found myself thinking about that conversation on and off since then, and I am now ready to change my mind. Not that I suddenly agree that a good sales force is more important than a good product. But I think both sides miss the point.

The most important thing for success in the market is the customer pain. It won’t matter if you have a great product and a great sales force if the problem you are targeting isn’t really painful to your customer.

A good sales force can sell a mediocre product to a customer if the customer’s pain is big enough, and the reverse of that is true as well. The pain is the key.

So, how do you go about finding that out? Well, two things. First, start with an industry that you know and have worked in for awhile. That will be your divining rod that will point you in the general direction of what is painful enough to develop a product around.

Second, you have to get out there and ask. When Robert and I started Phurnace we talked to more than 100 individual Java professionals (devs, sys admins, architects, etc.). All that we asked them was what was painful about their jobs day to day. And what they told us was that deploying and configuring their applications was really, really painful. That’s when we decided to build some software to help them out.

We didn’t stop asking about the pain, though. We kept following it as we were building the product, going back to those people we had talked to as well as our early customers and ask them what features they wanted and how they wanted them to look and act. We still do that. Every feature we add has to have a customer story behind it which makes it a lot easier to figure out what to put into each iteration.

If you are planning on starting your own company or looking for an idea for a product, there is a great book by a former software exec, VC, and now professor named Rob Adams that I recommend. (Full disclosure: Rob is a friend and on the Board of Directors of Phurnace). The book is called A Good Hard Kick in the Ass. It’s got some great advice on just the kind of market validation I’m talking about.