If You Build It, They Probably Won’t Come

Except they usually don’t.

The problem is that your prospective customers are busy doing their actual jobs. Most of them don’t know your product exists, and even if somebody sends them a link, investigating a new piece of software is just another thing on an already long list.

Their existing software might be annoying, but it probably works. Maybe your product genuinely is 10–20% better. But is it 20% better after I’ve moved all our data across, rebuilt the integrations, changed our processes, retrained the team and spent the next three months answering questions about where the button everybody used to click has gone?

There are also years of accumulated knowledge wrapped around the current system. Sarah in Ops knows the workaround for one problem. Somebody built a spreadsheet that fixes another. There’s a slightly ridiculous process everybody complains about but has been using for four years. Everyone knows which bits are broken, what to avoid and who to ask when something goes wrong.

The old software may be crap, but it’s known crap. That familiarity has value.

Then there’s the problem of working out whether your new product is actually as good as you say it is.

I visit your website and you tell me it’s faster, smarter and easier to use. Great. So does every other vendor in the category, including the people I already buy from. There are a couple of carefully cropped screenshots, some sweeping promises and perhaps an AI-generated photo of a smiling user, but surprisingly little that helps me work out what the product actually does differently.

What I really want is evidence. Show me the product properly. Let me play with it. Give me a sandbox. Or, at the very least, show me a ten-minute video of somebody using it to solve the problem I actually have.

Instead, there’s a big Book a demo button.

Now evaluating your product means finding 30 minutes in my diary, getting on a Zoom call with a salesperson, answering a bunch of qualification questions and sitting through their preferred version of the story before I’m allowed to see whether the bloody thing does what I need. I’m busy, I don’t particularly like being sold to, and the fact that you’re being so coy about the product makes me wonder whether there’s actually much there.

And even if the product looks good, I’ve still got another problem: your company.

You launched six months ago. You’ve raised a small seed round. You have seven employees and a handful of customers I’ve never heard of. You might go on to become the category leader, but you might also be gone in 18 months.

If I persuade 40 people at my company to move onto your platform and you disappear next year, I’m the person who gets to explain why we now need to migrate everything again. From my perspective, adopting your product isn’t just a question of whether it’s better. I’m taking a bet on your company as well.

So waiting suddenly looks pretty sensible. Let somebody else discover the bugs, find out whether your support is any good and see whether you can actually build a sustainable business. If you’re still around in three years and a few people I trust are using you, perhaps I’ll take another look.

This is the bit I think a lot of founders underestimate. They compare their product with the incumbent and think: ours is clearly better. The customer is making a different calculation: is this better enough to justify all the hassle and risk of changing?

That is a much higher bar.

And this is where building a startup can start to become quite dispiriting. Founders often assume that once they’ve built something significantly better, the hardest part is behind them. In reality, once the fun product-shaping bit is done, a different kind of work starts.

You have to get strangers to care. You have to explain the problem repeatedly without becoming boring, show the product, make videos, write posts, go to events, ask customers for introductions and follow up with people who didn’t reply. You have to sit through sales calls where somebody spends 25 minutes explaining their procurement process, and hear “this looks great, come back next year” over and over again.

For a lot of founders, this is almost the opposite of why they started the company. They wanted to build the product they believed should exist. They enjoy talking to users, puzzling over workflows, shaping features and watching an idea slowly become something real. They didn’t necessarily sign up because they wanted to spend the next five years writing marketing posts, recording webinars, chasing leads and making sales calls.

So they retreat to where they feel useful.

They decide the onboarding needs improving. They rebuild the dashboard. They add the feature three prospects mentioned. They convince themselves that sales are slow because the product isn’t quite good enough yet and that one more release will finally make the market pay attention.

Sometimes they’re right. But often they’re polishing the product because polishing the product feels like progress, while trying to persuade people to change deeply embedded behaviour mostly gives you rejection, indifference and unanswered emails.

Over time, that can wear people down. Progress feels slower than it did when they were shipping every week. Customers care less than expected. The founder starts to lose some of the energy they had at the beginning. Some adapt and get good at the commercial side of the job. Others keep hiding in the product. Some simply get jaded, run out of steam and quietly start going through the motions.

“If you build it, they will come” is a lovely idea. But nobody owes you their attention simply because you built something better.

And, in many startups, learning how to overcome that indifference turns out to be a much bigger job than building the product in the first place.