When should you start meeting with developers? Show don’t tell.

An advisory letter to people interested in building SaaS Products. I’m not trying to sell you anything. I am simply open sourcing parts of my brain on this topic.

One of the most frequent questions I get from people around me, and one I had myself when I was co-working on SaaS products with developers, is “When should I approach developers and others?”

It’s a tricky question, and the answer would be different in 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020 and 2050. The benchmark for when “you’re ready for a meeting” changes based on the competition in the overall industry (now at record highs), the skillset and work culture of the developer or other you’re meeting with, and your skill set and track record.

You already know that great founders “show don’t tell”. See how

simply presented demo in 4:38 minutes. Moreover, you can see a collection of real fundraising decks from real startups. In total, these decks have raised over $400 million. In other words,

“ If a picture is worth 1000 words, a mockup is worth a thousand presentation slides and a prototype is worth 1000 meetings.”

For example, If you were demoing Uber here is what you would say: “Hello my name is

and today I want to show you the easiest way to get a car to take you anywhere. By simply clicking here…” Here you can find a framework and patterns to simplify your startup description.

One thing is for sure going into 2019+: do not show up at a meeting without at least a functional concept and make sure they know that you ask them for their advisory, expertise (aka an MVP, ‘minimum viable product’, functional wireframe, prototype).

Simply put, showing up without clear research, concept and wireframe today is like showing up without a business plan in 1995 and demanding others time and money— you simply won’t be taken seriously by most people.

I agree to

, that there are two exceptions to this:

1. You’re meeting a developer/designer/etc who worked with you previously and you set the meeting in the context of “can I float an idea by you?”
2. You sold your last company and returned 10x for your previous co-founders and investors, and you put this meeting in the context of “I sold X 18 months after I started it, for 10x the valuation at which X invested. I’m working on my next idea and I want to show you the research.”

Even more, I agree to him that the bottom line is that, the MVP is the business plan and your resume. It’s the business plan because you can show it to customers and get feedback on it immediately, and it’s the resume because a people can see if you know how to build a product and even know whether or not you have a capacity to sell it.

To give you my view from the other side of the table, here are some things I want to know about before I will soon or later start investing in SaaS products, and how I might ask the questions about their concept to understand their ability better.

• Ability to identify experience patterns, issues and communicate ideas — What’s the problem and pain point you want to solve? Who experiences that problem? How they solve this problem today? How many user interviews did you do and how did it inform this product?
• Competitive landscape knowledge — “Who else has tried this same thing and failed before?” “What’s your advantage and unique selling proposition?”
• Product patterns understanding, strategic mindset and endgame: “What was your inspiration for this concept?”, “What’s the logic of your MPV features, core features, and how feature reach the product could be?”, “What can you tell me about side-market-experiences who can buy your product if you will enrich your product experiences for them?”
• Work culture, Soft Skills: “Who Designed/Coded/Gave Advise out his? Where did you find them?”, “It is a time to earn or learn for you?”

Everyone is a little different, but all good know the only thing that matters is people, product and market. And so you start to wonder — what correlates the most to success — team, product, or market? Or, more bluntly, what causes success? And, for those of us who are students of startup failure — what’s most dangerous: a bad team, a weak product, or a poor market? Read the guide to startups.

Moreover, you have a chance to find and learn great patterns from

post series about the first VC pitch. Very helpful. Don’t miss an opportunity to get advice from him while thinking how to build pitch that gives remarkable results. He developed a sense of what he think VC’s are looking for having sat on both sides of the table. Start from here- The First VC Meeting (Post 1 of Many) and follow the links at the and of each article(8 articles).

At the same time, you have to have in mind that the reality is that there are very few people who have a capacity to see the future and endgame.

Since most humans have a much easier time understanding what is, if you suggest that what they see is wrong, it’s very disconnecting and they hate it. because they are trying to understand their world and predict their future — that’s the main function of cerebrum, to find the patterns and predict what is going to happen next — and insofar as they realize that the future to them is somewhat greym or even black, its’ scary. — James Currier, qoute fromFounders at Work.

Yes, people see what they expect to see, or, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” as Anaïs Nin put it so meaningfully: The idea that our perception is as much a result of what we are able to know as of what we expect to find is not new.

Your job is to convince them that your pattern recognition is 70% right and suggest them what they see is wrong.

Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

What Howard Marks said about investment, fits our discussion too:

To achieve superior investment results, your insight into value has to be superior. Thus you must learn things others don’t, see things differently, or do a better job of analyzing them — ideally all three.

You have all control on this if you have a daily meal, laptop with internet. You have everything, right? I believe the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have. This advice is easy to state and is doubtless true; the trick is in putting it into practice in our life. If you want to convince yourself to want the things you already have, read this book.

• No matter what’s your current skill set, you can design a wireframe. But before that, you have to have a pattern recognition on products. If you are not a designer, you have to learn to see and develop your eye and strategic mindset. Founder without product pattern recognition skillset and strategic mindset, how features may fit together is impossible. There are a tremendous amount of high-quality educational and advisory resources online to learn things others don’t and see things differently. You can start by reading my advisory letter to people interested in SaaS product design. At the same time, you can find a local designer on Dribbble and pay C and B class remote designers to help and support you visualize your initiative with you, not for you.
• If you a designer, you have to raise your product pattern identification and recognition skillset and then design an MPV and present them to developers for and technical advisory. We are the most valuable key in the product world. We are salt of the tech world because we are the ones who present the solutions to the world. Co-working space is a great place to meet developers and ask them for their 5-minute advisory. Yes, if you are prepared well, most of the time the discussion continues more than half an hour. Remember, you can get time from people for an advisory who are too busy more than that from people who fucks around because the good ones know that they have limited number of fucks to give in their life and they give them carefully.
• If you are a developer, you have to raise your product pattern identification and recognition skillset and yes, you naturally can develop an MPV. Yes, you are a key dot to create and stimulate experience transformations, functionally. I love your mindset because when I have had an opportunity to work with 100+ devs at the same time during hackathons, my mindset enrichment speed skyrocketed. Yes, you have to develop your eye on UI/UX. You have all control on this, right? Later, you can easily find a designer to redesign your front-end solution simply by offering her/him an interesting share, right?

Have in mind advisory from

, that you play as you practice and you have to bury the hustle. Say no to more dumb shit. Engage with fewer things but at a higher intensity. Stick with it. Stop chasing so much.

• What tips do you have for people who have an idea to move forward their initiatives?
• Any questions? Feel free ask me on Twitter.

If you learn something from this article, share it with another person who is interested in building SaaS Products. I’ll love you for it, and they will too.

At first, I wrote this article to share with an internal Code for All civic-design community and later decided to share it publicly to help even more to know more. My core inspiration was from an article of

, with whom I have learned many. Because I am not a native in English, I have used some part of sentences from his article or change wordings on sentences to clearly express and share what I wanted to say to the people who are interested in building SaaS products.