Jesse Pujji tells a founder building a meeting-coach app to start customer conversations now, aiming for a few meetings each week. Retention is the metric that matters most. Set up a small beta with 5-10 active customers to test it.
I'm building an app that is used as a coach in meetings. We're building prototypes and there's a lot of interest inside the Build community. Now my team says I should quietly build, create a moat, and then pitch. Should I just quietly build the product and work with design partners, or should I do the sales route?
I think it's good to get out there and start having conversations on a regular basis. It doesn't have to be 5 meetings. It could be 3 meetings a week. Naturally, you're gonna have people who say they want it. Then guess what? They sign up. Like when we sold Kahani, everybody wanted it. Then they all turned 2 weeks later because it didn't actually have the features that they wanted. So you want to have some calibration exercise, like how many ongoing customers can you support at any given time? Let's say it's, it's 5 or 10, tell people it's a beta, but you're getting that muscle, just get yourself to a certain number of customers that you can maintain for a certain period of time. For a business like this, retention becomes the actual thing, the sales become easy.
