Founder takes: Focus on selling, not building

“Sell first, build your product later.“

That’s the guidance that Dr. Anand Lalwani, co-founder and CEO of Cardinal Robotics, offers to founders early in their growth journey.

For Anand, many first-time founders get caught in a race to build the most ideal version of their product. In this scenario, they spend months, if not years, iterating on their vision, building alphas and betas before going out to market. 

The intentions here are good. 

You want to present the best value proposition and a product that gets prospects excited. All of this is only possible with a 99th percentile product, right? 

According to Anand, the issue with this approach is that founders won’t spend nearly enough time actually validating their product—and their ideas—with their ICP. 

But it’s never too late to make adjustments. 

To help founders navigate through the growing pains of building and validating their products, Anand recommends a more pragmatic approach. 

Here, we outline his recommendation for going to market while getting the feedback you need to build a solid, long-term product. 

Note: Cardinal Robotics is a Rho customer.

The problem with the build-first approach

As a founder, one of the main concerns you have is a simple one: “Will anybody pay me for this?”

This natural response is paired with a reasonable solution: putting in the time to build a stellar product that’s hard for consumers, whether B2B or B2C, to say no to. 

But for founders, especially ones with technical backgrounds, this can be a mistake. 

“For technical founders, building is easy. Building is measurable. It’s under your control. You're not relying on somebody else to say ‘Yes,’ to you. Sales is hard. Sales is not natural to most technical founders,” says Anand. 

According to Anand, for founders both technical and otherwise, the idea of going out and asking people to pay them for the product they built is anxiety-inducing. 

"'Hey, I built something. Can you give me money for this?' It just feels wrong if you have not done it before." 

So they default to what feels right: allocating their efforts to building. 

For them, the impact of deploying Git commands can be seen and felt nearly every day. But the problem is that they’ve, till this point, built for an audience of one. And until some of that building time is reallocated to selling, it’ll be difficult to understand whether or not your product has true market potential or fit. 

Understand your customer first

To best position their eventual product, Anand recommends a more research-driven approach. 

One that prioritizes leading with understanding pain points rather than selling your vision out of the gate. 

“If you look at the best salespeople, they don't open a call saying, ‘I want to sell you this.’ They’re inquisitive,” says Anand.  

These salespeople will instead lead with questions, trying to understand the motivations behind these prospective customers. In the absence of this, you may end up making a lot of assumptions about your ICP, leading you to build a product that doesn’t truly resonate with anyone. 

One question you should be asking your ICP: “What’s keeping you awake at night?” or “If you had a magic wand to solve any of your problems today, what would use it for?”

Look for the top three things your ICP highlights as problems, and then dig deeper.

“If they are not actively thinking about these three things and you're not building something that addresses them, it's not a high-priority item, and they're going to move on,” says Anand. 

“So first, understand the human being in front of you, ask them questions, connect and bond with them on a solution.”

Validating your idea 

Once you’ve done your due diligence on understanding your ideal customer, now it’s time to put pen to paper and start ideating on your product. For Anand, there’s an approach to this process, too. 

“I would sketch my idea on a piece of paper and turn to my customer and say, ‘Okay, this is how I think I should design this system. What do you think?’” says Anand. 

By getting this direct feedback from your ICP you can, in turn, build a product directly informed and influenced by them. For Anand, there’s a small but important detail here: don’t just seek this feedback from a few folks. Go out and talk to as many people as possible. That way, you avoid building a product for one. 

“Show it to the ten other people similar to them. See if they all agree with you. If they're willing to pay, then go ahead and actually build whatever you had on that piece of paper. You don't need fancy Figma mockups or landing pages. A simple pen and paper is 90% of the game.”

What are you building?

In the end, the core message behind Anand’s approach is this: founders need to deeply understand their customers rather than make assumptions—this is how the best products are built. 

And while doing this may feel uncomfortable at first, it gets you much closer to building a product that’s easier to sell because it’s directly informed by who matters most: your customers. 

“Look at the current problems they are facing and how they're trying to solve them,” says Anand. 

“And then connect the dots. You can’t solve a problem for just one human or one company. That’s a consultant. See if this problem permeates across the board and then see where there’s a solution.”

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