Have you charged for B2B software before it has the features you want to sell?

Question

Hello everyone,

I have presented a demo to a good contact of mine. I have worked with their company before and the CTO liked my product, and I was very honest about how early stage this is. My product is commercial open source and the core offering is freely available.

The CTO wants to adopt the product for the company. I want to do a pre-product sales of my Business ($400/month) or Enterprise ($1000/month) plan to support the development of those features. I personally feel that if they like using this MVP, they might want to support the development.

Has anyone got any tips for how I should pitch this? The product is non-trivial tech and I have put in 4 months of full-time work to almost get to MVP. The selling point has become apparent but I need more time to justify the paid product.

Links:
Product - https://dwata.com

Thanks,
Sumit

Sumit Datta [dwata] 👋 · Accepted Answer

@katie_ames Yes you are right about the points. I surely am not confident as a seller, so I always think the software is not ready to make money and can not talk about charging money.

Yes I am talking about pre-sales, rather pre-product sales since the product is not "ready" according to me. The potential customer is actually interested in trying it but I guess I find it odd to charge right now since I know a few useful features are missing.

Sumit Datta [dwata] 👋 · Answer

@katie_ames You are right. I actually emailed the CTO with a little more genuine chase. Not like crazy, just very clearly stated that their adopting the software helps me and they would get their problems tackled by someone...

Answer

@sumitdatta lol, pretend you are a sales guy, not an engineer and go and sell it today. He's literally trying to give you money and tell you your product is valuable and you're disagreeing with him.

Answer

I mean I feel the goal of agile development / lean is to get it to market as quickly as possible.  Are you talking about pre-sale?  Or someone using it?  If someone is using it that's great - you'll build a much more valuable end product as you'll know their pain points etc., very well as you work with them.  Def go for it if you can.

also, personal opinion, most software guys sell their product short as they see the flaws, while everyone else sees the benefit. So per your last statement - maybe you don't need to do more work to justify a sale, maybe it's great now and will be better in the future.

Have you charged for B2B software before it has the features you want to sell?

Replies