/notes/ ·
Closing the channel to save your own time
A contact told me recently that they had started closing digital channels for their customers and making the buying process heavier, so it would take less of their own time. It works. The last customers leave, and after that there is no time spent on anything at all.
The opposite is available and it is not expensive any more. You can test and iterate through versions with AI tools and give customers a route that brings in new business without a salesperson standing in the middle of it. That needs three things. The product has to be clear and the onboarding has to actually work. The website has to say one thing, consistently, with no jargon, written for someone hearing about you for the first time. And you have to sit at the customer edge permanently, watching where people churn, and fixing that part of the path.
That is the loop I ran on Selda. Get people into the funnel, find where they drop, fix it, put new people in, find the next drop. Eventually the platform holds all the way through.
Do not trust your own opinion that the product is ready. Build a version, put it in front of customers, take the feedback, improve it, and keep going until it works. The idea that you build one version and then go and sell it is half right and half wrong; the selling is what tells you what to build next.
A lot of people go looking for funding and the noise around it first. Solve the problem. In a product like this funding is a good way to buy scale and distribution, but only once the real thing is solved. If you are willing to sit with the hard part long enough to work it out, it pays you back.