When sales outpaced product
A founder realized the biggest risk had shifted from the market to the product.
The situation
I spoke recently with the cofounder of a company building fabrication equipment for the steel industry. The founder shared this story because they thought other hardware founders in the network might learn from it.
They started with a prototype and an assumption: the fastest way to improve the product was to start selling it.
They had built an early machine as part of a university project and began taking it to potential customers. The goal was to learn whether the idea solved a real problem and what needed to change next.
The plan
The founders started by reaching out to industries they already knew. They cold called local shops, loaded the prototype into a truck, and drove to customer sites to demonstrate the machine in person.
Over time, they found a few early customers willing to take a chance on the product.
Looking back, the founder described those first sales as more motivational than meaningful. The machines had limited functionality, and the customers rarely used them. The sales provided encouragement to keep going, but they generated little product learning.
The team continued balancing engineering with customer outreach, believing that each additional conversation would help clarify what to build next.
Where uncertainty remained
As time went on, the founder began looking at that period differently.
The team had already seen enough to believe there was a market for the product. They had spoken with customers, demonstrated the concept, and found people willing to buy once the machine became useful.
Yet they continued spending significant time trying to sell a product that still wasn't ready.
Meanwhile, engineering decisions were being made quickly so they could keep moving. Connector choices, communication protocols, and other design decisions made under time pressure became part of the product architecture.
Years later, many of those decisions were still difficult to change because existing customers depended on them.
What needed to be proven first
One part of the conversation stood out.
The founder wasn't arguing that customer validation was unnecessary. Those early conversations gave the team enough confidence to keep building, and they helped confirm there was a market worth pursuing.
Looking back, the realization was that the company kept treating customer validation as the biggest uncertainty long after it had already been reduced.
By that point, the more important question was whether they could build a product customers would continue using. The founder felt they would have been better served spending less time pursuing additional early sales and more time improving the product itself.
The pattern
Founders are often told to get in front of customers as early as possible. That's usually good advice.
The harder question is knowing when those conversations have answered the most important questions.
At some point, continuing to validate demand creates less value than reducing the next source of risk. In many hardware companies, that next risk is the product itself.
If you're in a similar spot
If you're building an early product, it can be useful to ask what uncertainty still needs to be reduced.
Is the biggest question whether customers want what you're building?
Or have you already learned enough to know that the next investment should be in the product itself?