Should you pre-sell your SaaS before you build anything?

I hate giving this answer because it doesn’t really say anything, but here we go: it depends! It’s such a classic consulting response. No worries, I won’t leave you hanging here.

As a non-technical founder, you have to find out what the technical risk of the product is. Anything that would significantly delay your release or even prevent you from doing it altogether? How sure are you about this? What are you going to do if things don’t work out?

Since you lack technical knowledge, it’s easy to assume something could be easily done when in reality it isn’t and either requires specialized knowledge (for example, those who know how to build an app may not necessarily have experience with vector databases if your app needs them) or a long time.

That’s why unless you have a plan for how you’re going to deal with the technical risk, I wouldn’t pre-sell. It’s putting unnecessary pressure over you. Sure, it sounds nice in theory: your customers fund the product, which is the ultimate validation, but even this doesn’t mean they will stick around for renewals.

It’s already a game you have to be prepared to lose and not even bat an eye, so making it harder on yourself by also taking on extra responsibility is bound to occupy space in your mind that you could use on getting people excited about the product.

You’re in business to make money and you certainly should know there’s no such thing as easy, outsized returns and no money down. But the good thing is this investment pales in comparison to starting a real-world company and even has better returns due to the potential reach for a SaaS product.

As with any investment, you may lose it all or may get some of it back by selling the code if it doesn’t work out, but that’s something I’m sure you already considered and should be okay with as an entrepreneur.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide whether you want to pre-sell or not as long as you’ve taken into account potential downfalls and how to deal with them if they do happen.

And if you ever need a technical consultation to evaluate the product risk, just reach out to me on LinkedIn.