The Fact That Your App Was a Weekend Project Is Not a Feature

The fact that your new application was a weekend project is not a feature! I see announcements like

• We just coded this up last weekend take  a look…
• I wrote this on a Saturday afternoon check it out…
• We built the tool (over the last few weekends)…

I don’t know if it’s Startup Weekend’s original promise of launching a startup in 54 hours (which they have walked back very carefully over the last few years) or teams taking “fail fast” too much to heart over “fail well” but I worry that prefacing the description of your offering with how little time you have spent on it is a way of rationalizing a prospect’s future rejection.  If prospects don’t like it then that’s OK because you didn’t spend much time on it. But it’s an attitude that can minimize learning.

Worse, “We just slapped something together please take a look” is not a compelling feature to highlight if you are selling a business application. Business owners and managers have no desire to QA half-finished products.

Three Things to Highlight Instead

1. Talk about why you are committed to solving the problem.
2. Explain how they can assess the impact on their task, job, or business. Shift your focus from what they think of your product to how they will asses it’s value.
3. If your product has features that offer a diagnostic or analysis of a prospect’s situation or data those may be the most important to develop early, if only to help prospect’s become more aware of the extent of problems that they may have.