# Sell Before Build

#concept #validation #strategy

## Summary

Prove demand with **paid money before building anything** — because building is the most expensive, least reversible move, and every cheaper signal lies. Founded as a page by [[2026-07-26-main-principle-of-successful-business]] ([[oskar-hartmann]]), but the rule itself is now held by **three independent traditions**: RU dev-sales ("validate market and pain before writing code"), [[dan-martell]] (the $50 paid waitlist; offer → pre-sell → build), and Hartmann (the full experiment toolkit below). That makes it one of the vault's best-converged disciplines. A 2026-07-29 short restates the rule in AI-era compression ([[2026-07-29-start-a-business-with-claude-code]]) — initially anonymous, owner-attributed same day to [[dan-martell]]: **within-author restatement, not a fourth voice** (he already counts among the three traditions); the echo-grade caution paid off, since no independence weight had been granted. What this page adds over [[productized-service]]'s validation paragraph: the **signal hierarchy**, the **toolkit**, and the **red flags**.

## Current Understanding

**The signal hierarchy** — what counts as evidence of demand, weakest to strongest:

1. **Click on a button** — weak.
2. **Email / waitlist signup** — stronger, and deceptive ("interesting!" is free).
3. **Payment** — the only real signal. *"Голос деньгами"* — voting with money.
4. **Pre-payment** — the supreme form: the customer finances your build. The humanoid-robot-data founder sold **$5M of prepaid contracts before collecting any data**; Tesla took 100K paid Model 3 preorders before building — "a $1.5T company still tests demand."

Corollary from the Zavent anti-case: if customers will *only* pay months after delivery, that's not merely weaker demand — **you have become a bank financing your clients**, which is a different business with different economics ([[unit-economics]]).

**The toolkit, ordered by cost:**

| Experiment | Mechanics | Cost | Caveat |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI-mockup + priced offer | Generate the most beautiful image of the thing; send to the target community with a real price and "who's with me?" | ~Nothing | Hartmann's coworking test: ~5,000 reached, 0 buyers, project killed pre-build |
| Landing → **payment screen** | A plain landing page doesn't qualify; the test ends at a payment attempt | Small | One word in the offer can move conversion 3–5× |
| Fake payment screen | Full-looking app; at payment: "Error, payment failed"; keep intent data | <$1,000/app | **Deceptive** — see Contradictions |
| Fake-door buttons | Ship all features as non-working buttons; build in click-count order (Samwer's eBay clone) | Small | Click is the *weakest* signal — use for prioritization, not demand proof |
| Wizard-of-Oz manual MVP | Deliver the value **by hand for the first 10 clients**, then automate | Labor only | The honest workhorse for services; Builder.ai is both its exemplar and its cautionary tale (see source page) |
| Visible pre-order / paid waitlist | Charge (even partially) before building — Martell's $50 top-of-waitlist slot | ~Nothing | The honest high-signal variant |

**Why cheap and frequent beats right:** intuition always deceives (the app studios found "quit casino" dead and "quit porn" live; Samwer's click order was "never what you'd guess"), so the discipline is many small falsifications, not one confident bet. The 12-week portfolio contrast: team A ran 10 tests and had constant customer signal; team B was still building with zero — same money, "the only difference is the willingness to launch ugly and look stupid." Failing at $1K is safe; failing after a 6-month build is fatal. This is [[sales-discipline]]'s reps-not-views logic applied to *what to build* rather than *how to market*.

**The red flag inverted:** "we've been working on it since 2016, no revenue" reads as dedication and is disqualifying — duration without revenue is absence of evidence. Cross-tradition convergence: Rodenko's *"a year of repackaging is for people afraid to pick up the phone"* is the same claim from the services side ([[sales-discipline]]).

**The AI-era compressed variant** ([[2026-07-29-start-a-business-with-claude-code]], added 2026-07-29): stand up the *appearance* of a business with [[claude-code]] (landing page, invented company name, waitlist), close paying customers by cold outbound, and only then have the AI build the product. Two points of contact with this page's machinery: (1) its internal waitlist is **unpaid** and so fails the vault's own bar — but the playbook's actual validation event is the **closed sale**, which sits above mere payment in the hierarchy, so it passes the money bar where it counts; (2) the invented-company front belongs with the toolkit's deception-based rows (a fake *business* rather than a fake payment screen) — same signal logic, same unmodeled reputational/legal exposure. Author: [[dan-martell]] (attributed 2026-07-29) — which makes the unpaid waitlist a **within-author drift** from his own $50-paid-slot rule, logged on his page. 42 seconds, no case.

**Boundary with the vault's other machinery:** [[pain-discovery]] finds *which* pain might pay (talk, watch spend); this page is the *experimental confirmation* step (make them pay, small). The acute-pain test bridges the two: if people pay even when the product is bad (hospitals), the pain is acute enough to sell a concept. Then [[productized-service]] packages what the test proved, and customer cash funds the build (Martell's format-triage logic — same sequence).

## Evidence

- Signal hierarchy, all toolkit rows, coworking/Zavent anti-cases, Tesla/robot-data/Samwer cases, 12-week contrast, red flag, checklist — [[2026-07-26-main-principle-of-successful-business]] ([[oskar-hartmann]])
- $50 paid-waitlist pre-sell; offer → pre-sell → build sequence; "customer cash funds the product" — [[2026-07-23-make-my-first-100k-in-month]] ([[dan-martell]])
- "Validate market and pain before writing code"; "most AI projects die from idea → code → launch" — [[2026-06-15-making-money-with-ai-2026]] (RU tradition)
- Convergent red-flag from the services side: "год перепаковки — для тех, кто боится взять трубку" — [[2026-06-15-rodenko-selling-development-expensively]] via [[sales-discipline]]
- Within-author restatement ([[dan-martell]], slogan-grade): sell via cold outbound before any product exists; "then ask Claude to build it" — [[2026-07-29-start-a-business-with-claude-code]]

## Related Pages

- [[productized-service]] — what gets packaged once the test pays; holds the when-to-productize dispute
- [[pain-discovery]] — upstream: finding the candidate pain; the acute-pain test lives on both pages
- [[unit-economics]] — pre-pay vs post-pay decides whose balance sheet carries the build
- [[sales-discipline]] — the same anti-perfectionism discipline, marketing-side
- [[cloning-over-originality]] — the toolkit itself is cloned (Samwer → Hartmann; 10 LLM-data companies → robot-data founder)
- [[niche-selection]] / [[tam-sam-som]] — "the smallest group with the most acute pain, by name" is a SOM statement
- [[oskar-hartmann]], [[overview]]

## Contradictions / Uncertainty

- `Status: tentative` on the specific mechanics (single-source, war-story figures); the *rule* itself (money before build) is three-tradition and as solid as anything in the vault.
- **Two toolkit rows are deception-based** (fake payment screen, fake-door buttons): they collect purchase intent under false pretenses, carry consumer-protection exposure in some jurisdictions, and their reputational cost if discovered is unmodeled by the source. The honest variants (visible pre-order, paid waitlist, manual MVP) deliver most of the same signal; the vault records the deceptive mechanics without endorsing them. A third deception-shaped variant arrived 2026-07-29: the invented-company front ([[2026-07-29-start-a-business-with-claude-code]]) — same caveat applies.
- **Tension with the articulation thread:** "don't dictate what the customer should want — build what's demanded" sits against [[outcome-based-selling]]/[[pain-discovery]]'s claim that naming a pain *better than the buyer can* is the value-add. Likely scoped — product demand testing vs service framing — but no source draws the line.
- The traffic-arbitrage trainer recommendation doesn't transfer cleanly to services (no cheap payment-screen A/B); the transferable core is "smallest paid test."
- Survivorship in the positive cases: Tesla and the $5M founder are selected wins; the fake-payment studios' failure rate across their 20-app batches is exactly the data not shared.

## Next Questions

- ~~What is the smallest *paid* test for a dev-services offer — a paid audit? a deposit-backed discovery sprint?~~ **Proposed answer 2026-07-26** ([[2026-07-26-eugene-90-day-plan]]): a **fixed-price, fixed-scope paid diagnostic** scoped to *one* line/device/process. It clears four constraints at once — money before build, small enough to skip procurement, produces the missing case study, and doubles as an [[offer-ladder]] entry rung. Vault inference, **untested**; no source states it. Its live falsifier: if free feasibility assessments are the industrial norm, the paid bar can't sit here and must move downstream.
- Where is the legal line for fake-door testing in the owner's jurisdiction(s)?
- Does pre-payment willingness vary by market culture (US vs EU vs CIS B2B), and does the Zavent post-pay trap generalize to enterprise services where net-60/90 is standard practice?
