Automate Your Agency

Is perfecting your product first a waste of time?

• Alane Boyd & Micah Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 23

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As founders, it’s easy to feel the pressure to perfect every little detail before launching a new product or service. But sometimes, the best insights come from diving in and letting real demand shape what we build.

In this week's episode of Automate Your Agency, Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson share the power of “selling first.” They explore why putting an idea in front of customers early—before it’s even built—can reveal critical truths about product-market fit, saving you time, money, and probably a few headaches along the way.

Tune in as they discuss: 

🔹 The upsides (and challenges!) of selling without a finished product 

🔹 Avoiding the trap of “false positives” in client feedback 

🔹 Recognizing when to pivot based on early sales 

🔹 And much more!

If you’ve ever wrestled with when to bring an idea to market, this episode will give you practical insights and encouragement to “test the waters” with confidence.

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For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

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0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations. All right, Micah, we left off on the last podcast episode talking about getting your messaging right, focusing a little bit more on sales first rather than building first.

0:00:30 - (Alane): And we've definitely learned that lesson, I'd say more than once.

0:00:34 - (Micah): Multiple times, no doubt.

0:00:36 - (Alane): Yes. Luckily, we are doing a little bit better. And I think maybe I also speak up a lot more because I'm on the let's just sell it and we'll figure the rest out later.

0:00:49 - (Micah): Yeah. And I would say for all the listeners, for context here, if you don't know Alane, and I personally, Alane is sales first. We'll figure the rest out later. 100%. I'm like, wait, before we do that, we need a plan and let's prototype and let's do all of these things. Because I get this huge, I'm just going to say anxiety. My anxiety level rises, going, what if somebody's interested? Then what are we going to say? Then? Where do we go?

0:01:27 - (Micah): And hopefully I'm not the only one out there that's feeling this way. But what I would say over the years, Alane, as far as you and I working together, you know, that we, we've gone back and forth quite a bit between those areas. And I think now, like you said at the opening, we are dialing it in a little bit better. I 100% see much more clearly that we don't have to build everything first. We don't. I mean, we've spent a lot of money doing that.

0:01:55 - (Micah): Way more than just have to change it.

0:01:57 - (Alane): Yeah. To change it. Realize that it wasn't going to sell, that it didn't resonate with customers. And this is why. Not that my way is better than your way. But we have to know that customers want to buy something before we spend days, weeks, months building. And sure, maybe we've gotten ourselves in a pickle from me going out and having an idea and going and selling it. And then, yeah, we do have to scramble a little bit to figure out how we're going to fulfill it.

0:02:27 - (Alane): But that is less costly at times than I would agree so much into a product.

0:02:34 - (Micah): Not necessarily that it's two evils. Right. It's not the lesser of two evils. But I'm on your side. I now I would definitely say I would rather sell it, make some money even if we lose A little bit of money in the first couple sales. Right. We're, we're figuring it out. That's a much better place to be in than lose a boatload of money building the wrong thing.

0:03:01 - (Alane): Yeah. And the reason too, that sometimes the person that's in the position to be talking to customers more often, they're hearing over and over again what pain points are. And sometimes I'm just there and I'm like, I've got an idea. I think we can do this and we're going to just try selling it. And yeah, we're going to figure out how to build it later. But I've heard it so many times that I'm like, I think this is a service or a product that we can sell right now and make some money off of and turn it into something we can go to market with.

0:03:34 - (Micah): And yeah, it's interesting you say that because, you know, I can see it from the other perspective too. Right. Like from a sales perspective, you're hearing it from a lead level. Right. So they maybe haven't purchased yet. But then on the account management, working with clients strategically, you're going to hear other things. And I think I've followed those almost as false positives because I would hear multiple clients say the same thing.

0:04:06 - (Micah): I would see multiple clients run into the same issue and then go, all right, this is it. We are going to solve this problem. Let's dedicate. Because everybody's saying this, but what was missing in all of that was the sales side.

0:04:22 - (Alane): That was just a bunch of clients. They exchanged money and we're just going.

0:04:27 - (Micah): To say that it was a pain point big enough that they'll pay us to fix it. Just because they said it multiple times in an existing client relationship relationship didn't necessarily mean they cared enough about it to pay us money to fix it. And that's where we went wrong a few times.

0:04:45 - (Alane): Yes. And that exchange of money for services or product is the best foolproof way to know that you are going to make money selling whatever you're building.

0:04:58 - (Micah): And we say the only way there's.

0:05:01 - (Alane): There is no other way. Because I can think about like Ford and designing a vehicle he did not know.

0:05:09 - (Micah): That's a little different. All right, so there are some, there's some luck involved. There's some guests. There's some guests.

0:05:15 - (Alane): But like really educated guests, good educated guesses out there that people probably will spend money on. But in most of our day to days, we need some proof to it or that's when businesses go get out of money. Even ones that have raised a ton will go out of business because they had an assumption that they could sell something and they couldn't. And that's not why every business goes out of business. But if you don't have sales, you certainly will not continue making it in business.

0:05:44 - (Micah): That's for sure. That's for sure. You know, so let's talk a little bit about what can you do to get those initial sales. The first thing that comes to mind for me, because this is top of mind, is show up at events. So Alane, you and I have been, and I would say our whole team, we've been talking about messaging quite a bit this year and we've been adjusting and we've been working with thing and that falls into branding.

0:06:10 - (Micah): But the most healthy thing for me is to try to say it out loud. Right? Like we can talk about taglines and we can talk about what we want to sell, but if we can't describe it, that's where like going to events for me and just trying to describe what we do in different ways or like test messaging or test offerings or test services. People that you're meeting at a conference, they have no idea. Right. If they're interested, great. Pick up a conversation, see where it goes. Like it's going to be a week or two before you know they're not going to buy that second. And then you're going to have to put something together that evening. Which my brain used to tell me would happen.

0:06:53 - (Micah): Yeah, I, or maybe I'm just not that good of a salesperson.

0:06:57 - (Alane): But you think of every worst case scenario. Well, what if, what if, what if I'm like, but what if none of that happens?

0:07:04 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah, I know. Well, that's why we work well together because we are typically on the opposite end of. Yeah, yeah, but going to, going to a conference, going to a show, going to an event, going to a networking place and when people, the first question everybody asks you is, well, what do you do? Try different pitches. If they don't get it, if they do get it, like you're immediately going to be able to measure does this make sense to them or not?

0:07:32 - (Alane): Yeah, this, I have such a great example of this right now because I went to a conference. So we, we have an episode, podcast episode on our AI powered lead gen tools that we've started now. We built them for ourselves, they were working and some founders saw what we were doing and asked us to start creating them for those. So now we're adding that as a product. But we don't Have a landing page about it.

0:07:55 - (Alane): We don't have any information, but we are starting to sell them. We can fulfill them. And I was just at a conference where I don't have any materials to take with me about this yet. It's a brand new product we're selling. And I took screenshots of the QR codes and put them on my phone. And when somebody would ask what we do, and I'm like, hey, can I just show you this AI powered Legion tool? Let me see what you think.

0:08:20 - (Alane): And we had four meetings just from that. Like, it was so simple. It is a screenshot of a QR code that leads to one of our tools. There's no other asset that I have, and we're turning that into interested people without having a bunch of marketing, without having anything else other than me in a few sentences and a tool that they can see firsthand.

0:08:42 - (Micah): Yeah. So to translate that, we spent very little time, next to no time, very little money before we started generating money. And so now we're generating leads. We've already generated sales from that. We're seeing this as an opportunity. When that money comes in from spending no time on it up front, then we have the resources automatically to do marketing. Right. To build content around it, to run ads, to do the stuff that we need to do.

0:09:16 - (Micah): And we've already proven that if we accelerate this, then we're going to get the sales. It's not. Let's accelerate it and then hope we get the sales. And in this, Alane, like you've already figured out a lot of the messaging. How do we describe it? How do you even pitch it? You just came up with it on the fly with showing them and doing the demo.

0:09:39 - (Alane): Yeah. So this concept that we're talking about is not a new concept in the software world. It's called an MVP stands for minimal viable product. And the whole idea is because when you're building software, it's very expensive. Software developers aren't cheap. And you're needing to get a product out and in front of people before you've invested tons and tons and tons of money and you have no more resources to market it.

0:10:05 - (Alane): And I think this idea of an mvp, it can be applied to everything in a business. And we certainly have now adapted that into sales and fulfillment so that we can get things out, test it, what works, what doesn't. But it took us making these mistakes and so I thought it also would be good. Micah, when we to talk about a time where we had false positives and we spent too much Time building in the backend before getting things up front. And that would be with our software arvo.

0:10:39 - (Alane): You know, we kept hearing from our clients, there needs to be a better way to do this. There needs to be a better way to do this. And we went straight to building. And yes, we built an mvp. But because we have software experience, it was a really nice mvp. And we thought we'd get it to market and it would sell like hotcakes. And we almost too, there are things that worked really well with Arvo that we didn't want to listen to from the customers and instead we wanted to keep going down our path.

0:11:08 - (Micah): Yeah. And I would say with Arvo too, right. We test marketed, we tried to do this. We just didn't do it enough. And then when we saw any inkling of success, we were like, hell, yeah, this is going to crush it. Let's go after it, full speed ahead. And one of the indicators that I remember early on was we ran some Google Ads and we got people to sign up for the free trial. And it was big names, right?

0:11:35 - (Micah): Big corporations, Fortune 500s were like, we're hitting a pain point. We're going to crush it with this. This is awesome. And we didn't wait for the money to come in. We just hit that gas pedal and went for it. And the reality is there were a lot of rough edges that we needed to smooth out. In the beginning, we still had bugs. We still didn't do enough customer discovery to figure out what the pain points really were.

0:12:03 - (Micah): We got super excited. We thought we knew what we were doing. And yeah, we learned the hard way on that one.

0:12:12 - (Alane): Yeah, we did. When it comes to software, I feel like those lessons are the hardest because it's the most time intensive, resource intensive that you can be. But we do it every day. We see it with our clients where we focus on the building side and not on getting things out. And it's a process that we don't want to keep repeating. We are trying to keep ourselves in check a lot more now.

0:12:40 - (Micah): Yes, yes. Yeah, I think that was a really good in recent example for us. So even as we go into different things that we want to do or try to do, we are. And I think that's why earlier, Alane, when I said that's the only way is it's just the easiest way to measure. Did. Can. Will somebody pay us money for this? And even if they pay it once, will they keep. If it's a subscription, how long do they keep paying? So that was the second battle that we Fought with Arvo was like, we got it to a point where we had subscribers, we have people paying it, but our lifetime value was pretty low. So then back to the drawing board.

0:13:23 - (Micah): What did we miss? Where is it the messaging? Is it the ui? Is it the feature set? There's so many variables that get introduced once you jump into it, especially with software that can make it very, very difficult.

0:13:37 - (Alane): And one of the things that comes to mind when we're talking about this is every company does this, large and small. And when we were building our company together, do you remember Google? With Google social media, so they have endless resources to build whatever they want to build. And they came out with their own social media platform to compete against Facebook and all the other ones that were making it big.

0:14:03 - (Alane): And they dumped so many resources for years and no one cared. They could never get any traction. And they realized eventually, let's just stick with reviews. People are writing reviews. We've got it hooked up to Google Maps. That's all we're going to do. We're going to just. They just canceled all their other social media efforts on Google after that. And so they tried. They think, you know, just like we think, oh, we're going to change the game. We're going to come out with this and it's going to be amazing. It's going to be the field of dreams. People are just going to be running towards us and it is not the case no matter how big or small you are.

0:14:41 - (Micah): Yeah, that's a great example, Alane. I haven't thought about, probably most people haven't thought about Google in a very long time. People are even ever heard of it.

0:14:51 - (Alane): Talking about.

0:14:52 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah, I know, really dating ourselves here on this episode. But yeah, that's. I mean, that's a perfect example. It isn't just small business, it's very, very large business too. And even teams within businesses, we see all the time that it's. It's easy to get excited about stuff, it's easy to get excited about change. I'm so guilty of that almost every day. And it really comes down to, is this going to work to generate money?

0:15:22 - (Micah): Yeah, if it's going to generate money, you can figure out how to systemize it, you can figure out how to automate it, you can figure out how to make it more efficient. Like figure out how to make money first. That's why we're in business.

0:15:37 - (Alane): Yeah. One of the examples that I remember vividly, and I think it was the first time in our other company that I came up with an Idea to sell something. I didn't even tell you I was selling it, and I just did it. And. But it was the building blocks to what we built in software eventually. And it was the dealerships have customers. And I was realizing that it was they have 400 repeat customers every month going through their service department, but they weren't getting any positive reviews. So I just said, you know, hey, can you send us your customers or can we just download them from your CRM and we will send an email to all of them asking them to write a review?

0:16:21 - (Alane): And it was a service. It was all done manually by our team. This was years ago. And I sold it to like five clients for like $200 a month. Clearly, we are not making margins on this manual work that we are doing. But it was working and they got positive reviews. And so we were like, hey, if we ask customers that came in through service to write a positive review, we are seeing that happen. And we eventually built it into our software to automate that whole thing. We took it away from it being a manual process, but we saw, okay, they're going to pay for it. They're willing to spend $200 a month.

0:17:02 - (Alane): And if we could build some software around it, we could sell this to every dealership, because every dealership needs positive reviews. And that's eventually what we built. And so was it scalable in the beginning? No. Did we get money for it? Yes. And then we could figure out how to scale it later on. And that's what we did. And built a really successful software company off of that.

0:17:22 - (Micah): Yeah. So this makes me think of kind of a good way to describe this, and I think I might start using this myself. Alane, as well, is become your own investor. Right. When you go to pitch an investor, number one thing they care about for the most part. I'm generalizing here to a degree, but traction, especially this day and age. Do you have traction? How much traction are you making? $1 million yet. Oh, no. Cool.

0:17:48 - (Micah): Let me know when you make $1 million. Move on. And so if we think about it as we're going to be our own investor, would we invest in this? Would we? You know, and we as business owners and founders, we technically are. And so. But trying to take that kind of outside Persona. Right. While you're describing that, I'd think about that as an investment going, wow, they proved that this traction can happen, even if it's manual, who cares? Because there is a way to create software around this so that that's effectively like the investor pitch deck. That you'd have right there is like, hey, we just sold these clients. They're paying this much.

0:18:32 - (Micah): We need to raise some money because then we'll build the software, and instead of breaking even, we're going to have much larger margins because it's all happening through the software. So, anyway, I thought that was kind of an interesting. That's where my brain was going as I was listening to you describe that. I think I'm going to try using that for myself in the future.

0:18:50 - (Alane): Oh, I like it. That sounds fun. So I thought we could talk through some tips, too, on, okay, how do you go out there and try selling with not having a lot of things figured out on the back end? Because for some people, that feels really uncomfortable. For me, that feels really natural. But, you know, there's probably some people that aren't there with me and need some stepping stones. Yeah, that's me.

0:19:13 - (Micah): Yeah.

0:19:15 - (Alane): So one thing would be is, you know, what is a pain point that you're hearing consistently? You don't want to have one pain point with one customer because that's not scalable. You know, you want to hear this repeated problem happening over and over again. And for you, that might mean five. For somebody else, it might mean 200. You know, it depends on what your services and products are. So you want to hear a consistent problem.

0:19:39 - (Alane): You want to wrap an idea, obviously, about something that you can sell that, you know, in time you can fulfill. You know, I'm not selling anything. I didn't think that I.

0:19:49 - (Micah): Critical point there.

0:19:50 - (Alane): Yes. You have to have some way of fulfilling what you're selling. You don't know how, but you know it can be done. Everything I've ever sold, I know we can fulfill. I just don't know that. 20 steps we might need. Right.

0:20:02 - (Micah): So can I jump in for a second, Alane? Because I think this is so interesting. If you have a partner who is like Alane, who wants to go out and sell, you have found the best partner in the world, first of all. But for me, when she starts going down this path, it creates that anxiety. So at first I would get really defensive and be like, we can't do that. We haven't thought about it. What are you talking about?

0:20:24 - (Micah): And over the years, I've realized Alane already has it in her head. And what you just said, Alane, is, you know, we can fulfill it. Where the miscommunication can happen with partners is that I don't know that she knows that we can fill it. And I don't know how she's thinking about Fulfilling it. And so the way that we've resolved this over the years is. I have to ask that question, because in her mind, it's already done.

0:20:52 - (Micah): We're just selling this. It's like, why even bother communicating or saying anything else? Because, like, this is obvious. Right? So, I mean, I asked that, right?

0:21:05 - (Alane): Yeah. I was literally gonna say, like, it is so obvious to me. And I mean, when. Micah, I think it's so good that you're making this point. We have been through so many arguments as business partners over this situation because it is so obvious to me, and it annoys the shit out of me when you start asking questions and because to me, it is obvious to you, you are, like, about to explode in anxiety.

0:21:33 - (Micah): Yeah. I'm hearing this idea for the first time, and I like the idea. But Alane's already on, like, this is how we're going to sell it. This is how much we're charging for it. And completely glossed over my side of the world, which means once it's sold, then that falls on me and I'm going, oh, my God. What? What? What?

0:21:53 - (Alane): How?

0:21:53 - (Micah): Where? But I will say probably, you know, probably 98% of the time, I don't want to say a hundred. But as soon as I ask Alane, but how are we going to fulfill this? Then you have like. Like, my brain's already processing some super complicated system and, like, some ridiculous solution. Right. Meanwhile, you're like, micah, we're going to do this. And then I'm like, oh, yeah, that'll work. Cool, perfect. Let's do it.

0:22:28 - (Alane): So where Micah had to learn to ask the question, like, okay, well, how are we going to do this? And stay calm. I had to learn how to. He's not trying to second guess me or grill me. He honestly doesn't see what I think he should be seen because I've already developed this plan, and so we've gotten a lot better at it. But that can be a huge challenge for two very different people, like you and I, that are trying to run this business together.

0:22:55 - (Micah): Absolutely. Absolutely.

0:22:56 - (Alane): So.

0:22:56 - (Micah): So hopefully I didn't derail you from the other topics you were going to say. But that's. It's such a big deal. And if anybody's listening with partners or even just other employees. Right. If employees or team members are coming to you and they have ideas. Right. That can create anxiety if you're the integrator, if you're not. If you're a visionary, you see it clearly. Like, when I get in my visionary mode, I can see it Clearly. And I. The inverse happens. Right. Alane, you're going.

0:23:23 - (Micah): You just be the visionary for this because I don't know what the hell you're talking about or thinking about.

0:23:28 - (Alane): And do you know what I say next? Just go sell it and let's see what happens.

0:23:32 - (Micah): Yes, that's very true. That's exactly.

0:23:34 - (Alane): Because why are we going to argue over any of this if we don't know if we can sell it?

0:23:38 - (Micah): So I'm like, if we can't sell it.

0:23:39 - (Alane): Yeah, yeah. I'm always like, just go sell it and we'll figure it out. You can then tell me how it's going to work. Because until that point, I don't know that I don't care. But if I don't understand it at the first try, the only reason that I want to spend more time on it is if we do sell it.

0:23:53 - (Micah): Yep. Super valid points anyway. Hopefully that was helpful for people to hear.

0:23:59 - (Alane): Yeah. And then my third one is come up with some type of price point. It does not need to be your final price point. And I think that's a hard thing that we've had in the past, as well as other founders of companies or other sales executives, is we think we sold it for this and we've got to stay here. And that's not the case. Come up with a price point that you think you can sell it for and yes, you might lose a little bit of money. Like my example that I gave at 1.

0:24:27 - (Alane): 99amonth. Yeah. That wasn't our most profitable one, I would say. We did not break even on that. But it was a stepping stone. We did change the price point. We changed how we fulfilled it and we sold like hotcakes once we did it. And with an automated software that did it for you. So come up with some type of price point that won't put you in the hole, hopefully, and sell it to a few people. And if you realize after you've sold it and that you're fulfilling it and you are losing tons of money, change your price point.

0:24:58 - (Alane): If you change your price point and they don't continue to buy, then you know that is not a product or service to continue selling. Let it go and let it go.

0:25:06 - (Micah): Change your fulfillment.

0:25:07 - (Alane): Yeah. And then I think the last one would be that if you don't to stay healthy as a company, you cannot keep doing the same exact thing for 20 years. You need to have someone.

0:25:22 - (Micah): I would even argue to stay healthy as a person or as an individual.

0:25:26 - (Alane): Yeah. You know, you're going to need to Evolve. Things change. So evolve. And you're not going to be the only person talking to your clients. Most likely, as you grow and having these discussions with your team, hearing what pain points, having some debriefs after meetings because you can get, you know, we've been using the word false positives a lot. But when you, if you don't talk about things individually with your team and you always talk about it as a group, you're going to get the people that always like to share and it's going to be from their perspective, which may not be a true perspective. It's how they're feeling, it's what they talk about with their clients.

0:26:03 - (Alane): And so instead doing it one on one, do debriefs after big client meetings, after small client meetings with your individual team members, instead of always doing it as a group. Because then you can hear, okay, well now I'm hearing from four different employees, these are some pain points. What do you think we could wrap around this and then create something from it?

0:26:24 - (Micah): Yep. So one of my favorite clients that I work with personally is a company called Blue Mountain in Australia. And we've worked with them for years, as you know, Alane. And they call this Actionable Insights. And I just think that's the perfect term for this because exactly as you described it. Right. They want to know what are people saying? What's actually actionable, what matters. Right. It's not just a feeling.

0:26:57 - (Micah): What's the data showing? How do we capture this? What do we do with it? How do we act on it? How do we plan goals and everything around it. But the term that they've been using a lot is Actionable Insights. And I just think it's a fantastic term.

0:27:11 - (Alane): Yeah, I love that. I haven't heard it. You've been keeping that one to yourself.

0:27:15 - (Micah): Gotta save some of my secrets.

0:27:18 - (Alane): So I think we can wrap this one up. If you are a person that likes everything to be perfect, if you like to have the plan built out, then try some of these tips that we talked about to start getting in front of customers. You don't need it to be perfect. You just need to get it in front of people. Don't worry about spending all your time, resources and thinking power on having it figured out. Get it in front of people, talk about it, try selling it, give it a price point and have some fun.

0:27:47 - (Micah): Yeah. And if you're more on the salesperson personality who just wants to make money with it, don't forget you do need to explain part of your vision or I would not even say salesperson if you're more of a visionary, right? Which is going to be your typical founder and co founder. You know, just share enough so that the people who do get nervous about not having a plan has enough to go on and then you'll be able to work together much better.

0:28:14 - (Alane): Great advice. All right, everybody, thank you for listening and as always, we'd love to hear your feedback. Comments tell us how you go to market with your new ideas. Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate your agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website, workdayninja.

0:28:36 - (Micah): Com. And join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:28:40 - (Alane): Bye for now.

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Alane Boyd

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Micah Johnson

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