ProdShort
Turn meetings into ready-to-post shorts and posts
Start new thread

When should founders stop building and start selling?

by
•

We all know someone who just keeps building: One more feature, One more improvement, One more thing to fix before starting sales.

And to be fair, it’s easy to fall into that loop. Building feels productive, and there’s always something that could be better.
But at some point, you have to ask yourself: are you really improving the product… or just delaying sales?

From your experience:
When is the right time to stop building and start selling?

95 views

Add a comment

Replies

Best

I would say that start selling before building :D You need to know first whether it is worth building :)

 Completely agree!! Testing ideas fast is the right mindset to have. Either you get traction and it’s worth building, or you just fail fast, and that’s good too :D

honestly, you're probably ready to sell as soon as the core thing works, even if it's not perfect. waiting for it to feel "done" is usually just fear wearing a productive looking disguise

I’m learning this the hard way with an open-source desktop app. I kept thinking one more round of polish would make it ready, but the useful problems only appeared after real people tried it — even things like storage units and cloud files behaving differently during a scan.

My rule now is: once the core job works and mistakes are recoverable, start sharing. Keep building, but let user feedback pick the next thing.

I'd say the following:

  • Validate the problem before investing heavily in more and more features

  • Look for evidence that other people experience the same pain (forums, communities, interviews etc)

  • Build the smallest useful MVP rather than a full product

  • Get it in front of real users quickly

  • See whether these people actually use it, care about it, and ideally would pay for it

  • Then adjust fast and take it out some more

I don't think it needs to be perfectly ready, but rather useful as it is in order to generate some sales. If it can be used, you can start selling it (with maybe some incentives like get live access if you get so early on board).

I think thr real signal is when customers start for access before the product feels perfect. That demand tells you more than another round of polishing.

For me, the turning point is when another feature feels more like a comfort than a necessity. That usually the moment to talk to customers, test pricing, and let real demand decide what gets built next.