As an engineer (and bit of a perfectionist) it took us three months to get the first Plug in SEO out. Short by some standards, but way too long. Since then we’ve been releasing at least every two weeks with tangible benefits from the feedback loop it creates.

Sean’s advice seems perfect to companies with a narrowly focused product, like Dropbox. I wonder if the right path changes at all for a company trying to create a new platform or more complicated system/product, like Salesforce.com. I think Sean would probably say to delight customers with some smaller piece of functionality first and then build on top of that later to create something bigger. I wonder if Benioff would agree? Or is the right path in that case to message to the market about the whole solution and then build it like crazy even if the early customer have lower rates of “love” than what Sean like to see. My gut tells me Benioff would have a different opinion, it would be cool to see a debate…

That was a very useful interview.

Would you mind clarifying how you get the initial customer base to survey for market fit?

Our startup will provide a monthly subscription service to brick and mortar retailers. We are targeting one specific sector where we believe our product/service will initially work best. We’ve been told by multiple prospective customers that our service is attractive so we think we’ve passed that gate. The next step is to get customers using the service and it sounds as though you’d say “do it for free…just get the users and get real feedback.” We and our Board of Advisors already feel that way, but the challenge is that each customer costs us $150 in on-site hardware so I want to think carefully about that.

I’d appreciate your thoughts. Thanks.

“So partly what you want to do is just buy every related keyword, maxed out, and be very efficient on those keywords so that you can spend a lot more money on them acquiring users. So, the next guy can’t even consider spending keywords, so you’ve killed that channel for them.”

Do you put any effort into optimizing (or perhaps a better word is reducing) the length of the sales cycle? How would you go about this?

Reason I ask is that I would imagine you can fund a lot of growth with short term debt instead of raising equity if you’ve got the metrics to back it up and you can routinely turn over debt. I would also imagine this helps building up your corporate credit with financial institutions.

Thanks.