Hey product people! —It’s been 3 weeks. A major case of writer’s block hit me. But I’m back now. Hope you enjoy this one :)

In the early days of your business, sales is more important than marketing.

Let me tell you why:

Marketing

Early in your business, you need a strong signal for whether you’re solving a problem or not.

With marketing, it’s easy to mistake false positives for true signals (ie. likes, retweets, upvotes, site traffic, etc.)

There are so many things that you can feel good about that aren’t a true signal.

Sales

Sales is binary: Will they buy your product? Yes or no?

The feedback loop is direct and less open to interpretation: If someone doesn’t like your product, you experience the rejection live. Ouch

The Lesson

If your business is young, talk to every potential user.

Get on the phone. Go have a coffee (with face-masks). Schedule a Zoom call.

Even if you’re selling a consumer product. You want to know why they’re even giving you the time of day. And if they don’t like your product, you especially want to know why.

What went wrong? What can you improve/add/remove?

You can’t get that kind of feedback from the dashboard of your favorite marketing analytics tool.

📯 I want to give a shout-out to The Product Folks. They’re a premier community in India’s product scene. Lots of smart folks over here.

P.S.

✨ I onboarded our first users onto HiNote. The start of something magical!

🚀 Also, I launched a lil thing on Product Hunt last week: “Product Checklist”.

Thanks for reading Issue #25 😊

I’d appreciate it if you’d hit that heart button and share with a friend.

-Anthony