EP25 - Features, or marketing? (Part 3 of a series)

Here is the double-edged sword of the software business:

• All the “features” in the world will not matter if you don’t have the customer pipeline.
• It is better to lose many customers over a missing feature than spend a month on a feature that people say will make them sign up.
• Yet there really are features you’ll require in order to get and retain your best customers.

OK, so maybe it’s a triple edged sword. Or maybe a citrus reamer. Shut up.

I understood this in an intellectual sense, and I tightly managed our list of features for a long time. But we still built stuff that didn’t matter, while at the same time not building fast enough some of the things that really did.

But we did not at any point do enough marketing. Never. Not once. Not even now. (It’s #1 on my agenda for this year.)

So we will have these new features that our best customers really, truly need — features that will remove objections, and help us land some big fish, and retain them, too.

But it’s not like overcoming an objection will magically draw new eyeballs in. New features do not fill your marketing pipeline. The value is in the features only once your customer owns the product. After they learn your name, read your sales page, sign up for your free guide, open a trial account...

If there’s nobody to object, does a missing feature make a noise? No.

In this episode we talk about the marketing vs product conundrum, the third of five things I wish I’d known when I started Freckle, things that would have made my life so much more profitable and pleasurable.

• Missed Part 1? Listen here.
• Missed Part 2? Listen here.

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