One of the phrases I’ve heard a couple times in the past week is “you can never over invest in product.” The idea is that once you have product/market fit and a repeatable customer acquisition model, sales and marketing is always out in front of product development. There’s a natural tension between the go to market teams and the product/engineering teams, but often there’s an imbalance. Product development and engineering have nearly infinite economies of scale when combined with a great market.
Here are a few reasons why you can never over invest in product:
- Finding great software engineers, UI/UX professionals, and product managers is really hard. No matter how fast you’d like to hire, it always takes longer than expected.
- Software products have almost no marginal cost and great economies of scale making each incremental prospect signed and customer renewed that much more valuable. Better products make for happier customers.
- Market opportunities come and go. If there’s a really special opportunity at hand, the opportunity cost of not winning the market is enormous.
Once entrepreneurs are in the growth stage of the business, you can never over invest in product. An amazing product has so many benefits, and opportunities.
What else? What are some more thoughts on the idea that you can never over invest in product?
David Cummings on Startups 