Sell roadmap

Deliver on your promises and have customers for life

As a Founder, what do you have in common with the Founders of $100M+ ARR businesses? They too, sell roadmap to win, retain, and expand their customers. When done right, selling roadmap is an incredibly effective sales tool for Founders to drive deals faster, set clear expectations, and delight their customers with what they bought today and what they’ll get in the near-future. 

This doesn’t mean you fill your backlog with Linear tickets that are created due to empty promises to customers, it means you have a clear set of expectations that your customers want, make your product better, and help you build for future state faster while generating more revenue. 

The best companies in the world do this and do it often. Where teams get into trouble is when they don’t specifically scope requirements and get internal and alignment on specific deliverables. As a founding team, you don’t need to make this a contractual obligation if you have built trust and gotten the technical win on what you offer today (have written about technical wins in the past). 

Selling roadmap keeps your company in “growth mode” and moving closer and closer towards the company you envision building. When customers trust you and love your product, they will battle and partner with you to build the best one possible. 

From the POV of a buyer, which product would you buy if you were willing to take a bet on an early-stage startup?

Company A

• Has the best logos in the market as customers, tons of promise, tons of hype. 

• Has some features you’d expect them to have, exciting vision on what’s coming next, “Q3” is the answer for all features you’re asking for

• Network-connected CEO promises to have features ready in next two months if you can sign today

• If you buy today, there isn’t much you can use, but you’ve seen what others have accomplished once the product is in production

• No formal plan or document written out, access to their product/engineering folks on occasion when slides (not a collaborative doc) are presented 

Company B

• Fewer logos, but similar promise and hype as Company A

• Fewer features than Company A, CEO has understanding of your needs clearly documented, looped in Engineering, and has clearly defined timelines on when you’ll get each feature.

• CEO promises weekly meetings, connect async over slack, and constant communication on delivery of features. They commit to doing this with you so long as you sign today. You trust it when they say it. 

• You have direct access to their product/engineering resources over slack, they’re transparent and thoughtful. 

• If you buy today, you can use the product. It has some bugs, but the team’s turnaround to fixing it is incredibly quick. Unclear why others don’t use this… should they be instead of company A…? 😉

The old trope of “building the plane while flying” is real, and the most important thing is setting very clear internal and external expectations. People want to buy from and support hard-working CEOs, but you have to earn the trust of your buyers and technical champions.