In early-stage B2B SaaS, you often need to find a way to sell what’s on the truck by targeting customers who are more excited by product vision than product completeness.
Gary, what’s your view on allowing/using Roadmap commitments (versus vision) as part of the sales process in these early stages to land sales? Does that break the ‘on the truck’ rule?
I guess it depends on how core the future features are? For example, initially Xero only did one basic VAT return report, didn't handle things like flat rate VAT schemes, nor did it auto-file the VAT return with HMRC and these were probably deemed 'tickets to the game' features that we would have to add at some point, and therefore committing that we would in advance was probably a low risk strategy.
For features that are well off the beaten track, probably a little trickier / not advisable unless they were trivial or would address the needs of the mainstream and therefore should really be on the roadmap.
I found that early adopters were pretty patient, though.
It's great timing, it's like you are writing this specifically for me because we are in beta with Agendali.com. Thanks.
Gary, what’s your view on allowing/using Roadmap commitments (versus vision) as part of the sales process in these early stages to land sales? Does that break the ‘on the truck’ rule?
I guess it depends on how core the future features are? For example, initially Xero only did one basic VAT return report, didn't handle things like flat rate VAT schemes, nor did it auto-file the VAT return with HMRC and these were probably deemed 'tickets to the game' features that we would have to add at some point, and therefore committing that we would in advance was probably a low risk strategy.
For features that are well off the beaten track, probably a little trickier / not advisable unless they were trivial or would address the needs of the mainstream and therefore should really be on the roadmap.
I found that early adopters were pretty patient, though.