Many advocate that you should already have paying customers before you start building a full-fledged product. Others state that you should have a customer in mind, build the product, release early-and-often and pivot.<p>Either way, selling and distribution is crucial to your business. I'm curious what approaches people have used that worked for them to find customers and/or learn sales. This part of the business seems foreign many of us that come purely from a technical background.
The real trick is to validate the feasibility of said product via market testing upfront. It certainly depends on the time it will take to develop the product, but early validation is very important (and every step of the way).
Oddly enough, it seems rather foreign to people with a sales/marketing background. The folks I talked to did not know what to do without a $100,000+ ad campaign to help them push or a structure refined enough to be the sales equivalent of a Mcdonald's frier. Sales is hard.<p>What helped me the most so far, in retail, is networking with a lot of people who are most likely to increase my luck surface area. Here and there I find a great win/win business deal that seems to fall into my lap. I use those successes to pay for the seemingly less successful but more standard approach.