4 builders who never spoke to each other

Check they both want it and can pay for it

Want and budget live in different tiers of a market: the buyers who care may have no money, and the ones with money may already do it in house. Institutions only buy what moves their own numbers, savings they collect indirectly are a slow sell, and customers won from an audience with no interest in the category become your worst ones.

The method

1. 01

   Institutions do not buy things that do not move their own numbers, however good the outcome is for the people they serve.

2. 02

   Check each tier of a market separately for want and for budget. The buyers who want it may have no money and the ones with money may already do it in house.

3. 03

   Selling an institution on savings it will collect indirectly is a slow sell. Check you can survive the length of that sales cycle before you build for it.

4. 04

   Small business owners buy against payroll and cash flow pain. Efficiency arguments do not register, and no price cut fixes that.

5. 05

   Selling into schools needs existing relationships with administrators. Without them there is no route in, whatever the product does.

What it returned

• 100

  WePlate approached nearly 100 North American universities and not one would buy a product that did not improve their bottom line.

• $34M

  Call9 raised $34M for remote emergency consultations in nursing homes and pitched medical insurers on the money saved by avoiding unnecessary emergency room trips. It never moved the needle far enough, burned far more than it earned and laid off its 100 staff.

• Poliana found local news outlets uninterested, mid sized outlets interested but without the budget for visualisation technology, and national and international outlets already staffed with their own data specialists.

• The founder says his prospects were in survival mode and would not have given him their time even if the service had been free.

Sources

• 60-30-10 - the most important cold email framework I ever learned – Jakob GreenfeldJakob Greenfeld · jakobgreenfeld.com · 60-30-10 - the most important cold email framework I ever learned · 2023-02-08
• Biggest Y Combinator Failed StartupsFailory · failory.com · Call9 · undated
• What Happened to Poliana, the Data Visualization Tool?Failory · failory.com · Why did Poliana fail and shut down? · undated
• Shutting Down my “IT-Manager-for-Hire” BusinessJames Cort · failory.com · Your personal and your team disadvantages. · undated
• Building a Nutrition B2B SaaS That No One DemandedAlex Hu · failory.com · Which were the causes of WePlate’s failure? · undated