One of the biggest challenges that I see founders face is that there’s a lot of resistance that occurs when moving from your idea to that first stage where you can start actually testing your idea with customers.
Fundamentally, in order for anyone to start paying you for your product – and getting to that point where your business is real – the actual users in that business have to be able to access the value that you deliver.
Convincing people to take a chance on your product and roll it out – usually via a pilot the first time this happens – is really difficult. Finding candidate candidates for a pilot is easy, but nudging your offer through that initial sign-off process is very hard.
You can think of this as INERTIA. And the way you overcome commercial inertia is by using money. You can use effort and sweat as a proxy for some of it, but to move the needle you need to invest.
Unless you do this – unless you find what’s likely to be quite a scary amount of money and spend it – you can’t get moving.