Update: I keep seeing new founders skip the basic discovery call.

Back in 2018, we'd spend a full hour just talking to a potential client in Chicago before writing a single line of code. Now I see people trying to sell a $50k solution after a 15 minute demo. You can't understand their real workflow that way. How do you structure your early calls to avoid this?

3 comments

3 Comments

black.amy1mo ago

Forget the demo entirely at first. Make them walk you through their worst day last month, minute by minute. You'll hear the real problems they're too used to to even mention.

briancampbell22d ago

Had a friend who did this with a restaurant owner and found out they were spending two hours every morning counting cash by hand. Their POS system was so bad they lost trust in its numbers. That one conversation turned into a whole new software sale for her.

the_dakota1mo ago

Totally agree with the "minute by minute" part from black.amy. I tried this with a client who kept saying everything was fine. We just talked about their last bad Tuesday, and it turned out they were manually fixing the same data error for an hour every morning. They were so used to the workaround they didn't even see it as a problem anymore. That five minute story told me more than any demo could have.