Manisha Giri

I saw a great discussion recently about building a personal brand before the product is even ready vs building the product first and revealing yourself later.

For those of you targeting specific, legacy enterprise problems, which route did you take? It's tempting to build in stealth to protect the core idea and architecture. On the other hand, building a brand (in the sense of building trust) seems critical for those first few partners willing to hand over their messy internal data for you to structure.

If you had to start your current project over, how would you go about it? What have been some of the most unignorable observations centering on this aspect?

My team and I are launching our RFP library tool on Tuesday, but we are doing something entirely unscalable for our beta: we aren't handing our users a login.

We know that AI hallucinates badly on unstructured legacy proposals. So, rather than throwing an AI tool at unorganized files, we are stepping in as a temporary extension of the users' team. We do the heavy lifting of manually organizing their scattered past proposal data into an accurate, verifiable library. We want to ensure that the foundation is flawless before we automate any sort of self-serve onboarding.

Has anyone else launched a high-touch, concierge MVP like this? Did your early users value the hands-on setup, or did the lack of instant access cause too much friction?