Make It Work, Make It Sell

There’s an old adage to ‘Make it Work. Make it Good. Make it Fast.’ I have reservations with this because I think it’s difficult to get to the ‘Make it Fast’ stage. Normally, you’ve moved on to other things.

However, here’s an alternative:

Make it Work first. Then Make it Sell.

Your goal is to create a product that people want and are willing to pay for. This means making a product that people want and then charging for it!. Therefore before you think about making it good or making it pretty, just focus on making it work.

If it works, you can then test whether people are willing to pay for it by ‘Making it Sell’.

In most cases, products don’t need to be fast or pretty to sell.

Business software certainly doesn’t need to be pretty (just look at any financial software created in the last 20 years) but design or ‘polish’ provides a perceived value which increases your chances of making the sale.

Launch Then Sell

The most likely outcome of all the people I speak to (wishing to create products) is that they don’t get to the launch stage. They never get the opportunity to make it sell because they are too focused on making it pretty or good or fast.

Make it work. Make it sell.