The £100K Trap: Why Your Startup Idea Will Fail Without This

People evaluate what they should do based on the ginormous successes and the ginormous failures and the sensational stories. When you learn to program, what you want most of all is you have this magic and you think, I want it to be useful. I want to make things that people will find useful. Get someone to give you their money to do something. Because there's no better test of whether anyone cares than whether they're willing to part with their hard-earned cash. One of my favorite sayings is never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence. You don't have a million people right now. You maybe don't even have one person. So why are you worrying about it? If nobody cares, you can meet a beautiful, scalable, crystalline thing that nobody cares about. Welcome back to Build with Dean. Today's episode is for the person who has an idea for a startup and a SaaS product or a tech platform, but is not technical and doesn't know. doesn't want to waste a fortune building the wrong thing. Because one of the biggest mistakes that founders make is thinking that the first step is to build something and usually it isn't. So I'm joined by Justin Megawan, founder of Megaslice, who works with non-technical founders and domain experts to help them turn ideas into real tech products without getting burned by bad developers and bad processes. bad assumptions and all the mistakes so this is going to be a practical conversation and if you're sitting on an idea and you're wondering how do how do i approach this properly then this is probably going to be the episode for you so justin welcome thanks for having me on do you want to start by just giving us a bit of a background of what you do and how you help founders when they're building stuff yeah i think it's probably worth i don't want to go into a full origin story so to speak but it's probably worth explaining how we got here and why we do what we do. I think it was born of two frustrations, one internal and one external. So the internal frustration is really, I've been a software engineer for as long as I can remember. I've been writing software for as long as I can read and write really because my uncle taught me to program when I was a kid and I fell in love with it because You know, at that time, programming felt like typing some magic incantation into a computer and suddenly things happen. It was otherworldly to a certain extent. I think it's still true now in a different way. But when you learn to program, what you want most of all is you have this magic and you think, I want it to be useful. I want to make things that people will find useful, that will bring them some value. whether that's entertainment or actually functional in some way or whatever. And the worst thing for an engineer is to work on something for a long time and then not see it go anywhere. And that has happened to me a lot where I had worked in a team or unilaterally or whatever, worked exceptionally hard on something because, you know, I will pull my heart and soul into a project once I'm on it. And then it doesn't get anywhere. as a business commercially with the users with the market whatever and that's just the worst feeling it's the worst feeling if you're an engineer that must be hard i think sometimes um you know a lot a lot of the viewers would have watched um things like dragon's den and stuff and you've always seen those episodes where they go in and they say how much do you put into this and they say well it's 150 grand and they go you may as well put that money in the bin, you know, because obviously they know it's probably not going to be a market fit. There's a reason why it's not going to work. But that's kind of what you're saying is you're building all this stuff and then it might not even fit. Yeah, and it's a heartbreaking place to be. Heartbreaking place to be. And that's before you layer on. I'm not even talking about layering on. I've borrowed money. I've taken investment or any of that stuff. This is just purely... I've tried to put myself into something, hoping it would be valuable to someone, and nobody cares. That's a heartbreaking place to be for an engineer. That's the internal frustration. So the external frustration is watching others who want to bring something into the world, bring an idea into the world, or who have had an insight of some kind and think they can do something about it, watching them go to people who purport to help them, and they get nowhere either. Sometimes it's because they did things in the wrong order, which I'm sure we're going to talk about in this podcast. They sort of hoisted themselves by their own petard, so to speak. But many times it's because they had poor advice or bad suppliers or vendors, bad partners. And sometimes, you know, it's not malice, it's incompetence. One of my favorite sayings is never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence. And sometimes that's the truth. Someone, they got involved with someone who thought they knew how to bring something to market or get people to care about it. And it didn't work out. And that's heartbreaking as well. Because you think these are founders generally, I'm very spiritually aligned with founders because they put everything they've got into their idea. And when everything's, am I allowed to swear on this? I'm not sure. But when everything's turning poor. Not if we want reach. Yeah. So when everything's turning into the proverbial, they're the last people there who are still going. And I really respect that. I really respect that. And I think you need people like that in the world to make things better. So it's heartbreaking for me to watch it happening outside. Never mind my own frustrations. It's heartbreaking for me to watch potentially good ideas, potentially world changing ideas go to waste. And that's kind of the origin story of Megaslice. We want it to be different. And the numbers are brutal. I'm going to just read some stats too. 42% of startups fail because there is no market need, there's no market fit. That's from CB Insights. And more than two thirds of startups never deliver a positive return to investors. That's from the Harvard Business Review. So those are quite high numbers, right? And 70% of startups scale way too early. That results in their downfall. And that's from the startup genome. tells a few stories there of what to avoid yeah and i think a lot of it is there's a lot of mythology in how to to build a startup and there's a lot of bias um and when i say bias i mean people evaluate what they should do based on the ginormous successes and the ginormous failures and the sensational stories but not on the mass of actual reality and it's kind of like you know deciding whether you should take a plane to go somewhere based on news stories you would never take a plane anywhere because the only time the plane is in the news is when there's something catastrophic or sensational um you what you need to do is evaluate it on the millions and millions of flights that happen every single day um and there's never a hiccup everything goes to plan that's how you make your evaluation and startups are a bit you know very much the same so when people say oh how do I build my startup they'll say well this is what Facebook did this is what Elon Musk did oh this is what this is why Theranos failed this is why whatever and it's like everyone's right yeah but those are the sensational stories yeah and underlying all of it is also a sort of I would say almost like a cultural ethical assumption, which is about when do you build? When do you build something? And the prevailing view is, well, obviously I can't sell something that doesn't exist. That would be bad, right? Actually, no, it wouldn't be bad. And sometimes it's bad to not do that. And we can get into that. But yeah, that's the number one problem is, oh, I've got an idea. Let's go build it. The field of dreams model. If I build it, they will come and build it and they don't turn up. Yeah. And a similar kind of methodology. Most of our audience will know Daniel Priestley. Some won't, but he seems to be popping around everywhere at the moment with his face and talking about some government matters more recently, which is interesting. but one of the things you know he's got a company score app which is a you know a um like a quiz based lead generation platform um so um so sass um and he um he always says you should never you should never start a company if you can't find 150 customers first and that's his premise of that platform is that you should have a waiting list for 150 customers and if you can't find 150 people to join the waiting list you don't have a product or a fit if it's that hard to find 150 people to say i'll go on your waiting list then don't start it so it's a similar kind of premise i suppose in in that sense you know get you you can sell the dream and get get the um get the investment and get even customers i suppose up front yeah and i would go one step further and this is a view that is emerging more and more There's a chap called Rob Snyder that I recommend everybody reads everything he's ever written. I would go one step further and say it's when I use the word sell, I literally mean get someone to give you their money to do something. Because there's no better test of whether anyone cares than whether they're willing to part with their hard-earned cash. And I think that's where people get hung up. So if you go to a typical founder, suppose Dean you turned up to me with an idea. Oh, I've got lots. Yeah, and I say great idea Dean, but don't do anything until you've sold it to someone. And by the way, what I mean by that is someone has written you a check. You will go into it, you can feel it already, you'll go into a place where you'll think, well, I haven't got anything. I haven't even got a concept, I haven't even got a deck, I haven't got a website, I haven't got a product, I haven't got branding, I haven't got anything. What do you mean? sell it but that's exactly what people should do and we can get into the gory details of that all i will say is it is absolutely possible it's just about framing and positioning well let's start there so normally what comes to mind and what a lot of people will be thinking is well that's all right justin if you have all of the contacts that's all right because then you can go and you can sell it to people right so what what's the answer to that if if they feel unconnected and then maybe don't they don't know who they're going to go sell that to if that's that's step one well i mean that's the that's the very first question is who is it for who is it for so if you said to me hey justin i've made this new product it's really great and i ask you who's it for and you said oh it could be for anybody justin i'd say that's not market That's not a market. And the reason it's not a market is a very important reason, which is relevance. You want to walk into the room with a customer. And when you describe the problem you're solving, they say, wow, it feels like you're talking about me. Not just anybody. You're talking about me. There's a great example in the book Disciplined Entrepreneurship where he talks about a. a company that came up with a method of bonding things to the skin, chemically bonding things to the skin. And you can imagine all the things you can do with that, cosmetics, medicine, all sorts. And these guys decided they were going to get into their first market was going to be sunscreen. But it wasn't just sunscreen for anybody. It was sunscreen for extreme athletes. And they did really well. And the thing I love about that story is it's so obvious when you explain to someone If I walk into a room with an extreme athlete and say, you can have the sunscreen or the sunscreen for extreme athletes. They're going to say, well, that one's for me. That one's obviously for me. It has some properties, something about it makes it relevant to me and not to everyone else. It's a no brainer. If I go into Boots and see all the sunscreens and I see, oh, sunscreen for extreme athletes. Oh, I didn't even know that exists. Oh, yeah, that's for me. I'm an extreme athlete. So how niche do people go then? So if they're thinking, right, if they do have a product and they do think, right, well, this is relevant to everybody, you know, how niche do they go? Does it need to be, you know, that niche or can it be, you know, multiple niches or how do we work that out? So you want to be narrow enough to be highly relevant to your target audience, but not so narrow that you get FOMO as a founder. So this is one of the challenges that founders get is, They narrow down. It is work. It is real work to get anyone to care about anything that you're trying to do. And what founders start to think is I need to spread the net wider. I need to place lots of bets and see which one comes off. And actually what happens is with limited time, limited resource, limited money, by spreading your bets like that, you have reduced your probability of anything, any one of those things coming through. It's kind of like, you know that saying that if you try to chase many rabbits, you won't get any. Exactly. You want to chase one. That's really the same thing. So how do you avoid that FOMO and how do you avoid being too broad? Again, this is not me. This is all in the literature. But you want to say, for my narrow market, I kind of want to say, If I got everybody in that market, it's probably worth between, let's say, 30 and 100 million pounds a year. Because any broader than that, any bigger than that, and everybody's going to be going after it. It's like the toothbrushes in China. Everyone says, oh, if I sell like a 10p thing to everybody in China, guess what? I'm going to make loads of money because there's a billion people in China. The problem with that is everyone else has had that same idea and they're all competing. They're all competing in your space and you end up in this hyper generic space where you're not really relevant to anyone in particular and everybody's in there, especially big players. They're all in there trying to get that broad generic market. So that's no good. And if you go anything less than 20 or 30, you're going to think I've got nothing to grow into. Yeah. If I get a million ARR, where do I go from here? What you want to say is, well, if I just keep doing this, I know I have the potential to get to 20 or 30 or whatever. And if you do it right, Dean, what happens is walking in the room and selling is just telling them what you've got because you're extremely relevant. You just tell them what you've got. And they go, oh, that's for me. Yeah, got it. Makes perfect sense. How do you then go from there to proving what you've got can sell? So, you know, once you've understood who it's for, are there any tips for how do you actually get someone to buy? Yeah, so I think the first thing you do is you've got your idea. You think about who might care. Who might care? How many of them are there? Try and get into that sweet spot. Then, okay, it's time to talk to one of them. It's time to talk to one of them. And this is the next difficult bit for people. This is the hardest bit for people. Don't talk about your idea. Go and find out. You know, suppose you believe you're for, you know, you are for mums in the Nappy Valley. That's who your product is for. Yeah. Yeah. Sort of southwest London region. Okay, great. Go and talk to them. And the problem that you think you're trying to solve, that you think that they will find important to solve, go find out if they're trying to solve it right now. Don't talk about your idea. Don't tell them you're working on anything. Because Dean, and there's a great book called The Mum Test that talks about this. If you go and talk to people about your idea and say, what do you think? I'll tell you what nobody will say to you. That's a terrible idea. Go away. Nobody will say that. We're too polite. We're all too polite. So you can talk to people and they will say, oh, yeah, that sounds really interesting. Can you let me know when it's available? Yeah. Or you say, would you like to know about it when it's available? And they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely get back in touch. Because nobody wants to say, no, actually, I don't care. What's worse? So you take that as positive validation. You walk out of the meeting and think, oh, that was brilliant. Such positive feedback. We're not getting any negative feedback from anybody. And what's worse is people will say, oh, it'd be really good if it could do this. It'd be really good if it could do that. Oh, do you think it's possible for it to do this thing? Is it possible for you to do that thing? And everyone's scribbling away. Oh, wow, I've got a feature roadmap now. Yeah, I've got all these things we can do. And then what happens? You build it and nobody signs up. Nobody buys. Because when the time comes to part with money, everyone goes, well, I don't know. Maybe not now. Maybe I don't. it do I really want to pay for it that doesn't work I can't talk about it plays into how people buy anyway you know in terms of emotionally buying and then when it comes down to the logic side of things maybe not so so I find out what you need to do is you need to talk to the people that you think might care go figure out what they're actually doing And if you see a sign that they are already trying to spend money to solve a problem, or it's so painful that they're prepared to spend some money, or, you know, you just by watching them, you think this is horrible, the way they do things, or they've organized their life so that they're spending hours and hours and hours trying to solve a problem that you think you could solve in minutes and give them some time back. That's when you found something. Yeah, that's when you found something. And then you get to the next bit, which is that you still don't build a product then. You still don't build a product. Great. So what's next? Well, the next thing then is before I build anything, the problem with building a product, especially software, is you ossify the idea. So you go and build some stuff and then you put it in front of people and they go, oh, actually, I'm not sure I'm getting along with this. And it should maybe work like that. And you're like, you've got no flexibility left. You may have spent money doing this or worked with developers or whatever. You've got no flexibility left. The best thing you can do is run a manual service first. Whatever it is you're trying to do, do it with yourself, offering a service on pen and paper, using emails, using whatever tools there are out there and cobble them together and see if people will pay you to do that. And the great thing is, Dean, is you can charge what you are going to charge for your product. but you're providing a service. And because you're providing a service at a product price, people will say, bloody hell, that's a good deal. That's amazing. Well, I just pay you 40 quid a month and you're going to do all this for me. Now, of course, behind the curtain, it's mayhem because you are sitting there delivering this thing, spending your time, taking risk, whatever, working evenings, weekends, whatever, to deliver this service and thinking, I can't sustain this. that's absolutely right it's not sustainable it's not scalable yet but what you're doing is you're learning about what people want you're in conversation with them you know you have a relationship with them if you do something a certain way they go oh i don't i don't really like that can we do it a different way can you do this can you do that you can change it like this yeah there's no code to change there's no product to change nothing has um is frozen yet yeah But you know now that someone is willing to pay 40 quid to make this happen. And you can start to do little things like you can start to say, hey, instead of telling me this thing, would you mind filling in this form? Hey, would you mind going to this type form over here? Hey, would you mind clicking on this thing? Hey, I'm going to send you this by email rather than calling you up. And suddenly the service starts to turn into a more standardized thing. And that's the beginning of the product. If you do that really well. By the time the product comes around, you've got real people, real customers. They love it. They love you and your brand. If they're in your market, if you've got a very well-defined market, they're going to talk to everyone else in their market. You've now got some credibility in that market. So if you, you know, the example I gave, all the yummy mummies in the Nappy Valley, if they love your product, they're all going to talk to each other. Yeah. and your website is going to look highly relevant with all the right people on it and suddenly you still don't have a blooming product yet a product in the tech sense yeah but what you will damn well know is what the tech should do you'll say i know what the tech should do because you'll be feeling it you'll be like i can't do this forever i'm never going to get past 20 customers or 30 customers if i do it all manually i'll have to hire people but that's a great place to be Yeah, and it's a couple of steps slower, but then, you know, like you say, it's the learning, it's the experience, it's the understanding, and it's all of the stuff that you're probably going to find out later. So we're building a little bit of a roadmap here then for our audience and our viewers. So once they get to that stage, and I'm guessing that you've worked with lots of people along this journey. They haven't built the product yet. They're going to build the product. So, but they also haven't really established where actually, no, they're supposed to have sold because they've got people on the platform. So, so what's the next step along then? So we've got some people on, on, on their platform and it's now kind of a product. Yeah. So let's, if we just dial back a bit and say, so people have started using the service. You made enough changes to the service during that journey that. it's now starting to feel a bit more producty now you're about to engage someone to build that product and maybe you've done a very very early version of it people are still happy still buying your service you're learning about how to market to them really it's about continuing continuing in that vein and in the early stages of any product the worst thing you can think about is scalability what you have to think about is fantastic customer service Anytime anyone touches your product or your service or anybody has any touch point with anybody in your little company, they have to walk away thinking that was bloody brilliant. That was amazing. And you do whatever you have to do to make that happen short of bankrupting yourself. Because there's no point talking about scalability if people don't love your product. Yeah. There's no point. And again, you mentioned that stat about scaling. And the reason that people fail to scale is because they say, oh, we need to build it to scale. Because when we have a million people, this is never going to, you know, the way we're doing it right now is never going to work. Well, the brutal truth is, I'm sorry to say, you don't have a million people right now. You maybe don't even have one person. So why are you worrying about it? If nobody cares, you can meet a beautiful, scalable, crystalline thing that nobody cares about. So let me ask you a question then. So because I know that at this point, that's the question that people might be might be screaming is so, OK, so that makes perfect sense. So now you're going to get some customers. You're going to go a bit slower. We're not looking at scaling now until at what point, you know, along that journey, do we start looking back at, you know, the building up? Is that is that 50 customers that say, wow, I love this or, you know, what? what's the next part that's not to deflect the question too much the answer is is genuinely it depends on the on the particular thing you're trying to do if you're selling very high value things dean it may be you just need a handful of customers and that's enough to give you comfort um but if you're selling lots of uh lower price low uh high volume things um it may be that you need more and i think look finger in the air for your typical sas product um yeah As Daniel Priestley said, if you have 150 people who are in love with you, utterly in love with you, frankly, you don't need my advice or anyone else's. You will be in a place where you're like, bloody hell, this is really rolling. This is really rolling. I need to get it out to more people now. I now feel confident that if I spend serious money putting this out to more people who look like my 150, I won't be wasting my money. I will get the return. Yeah. So you want to get 100 to 150 really happy customers as the first major goal. For a typical SaaS product, I would say, yeah, if you're building, you know, big industrial robots, maybe you only need five customers who are in love with you. It depends. What are you trying to do? But you will know as a founder, if you go through this journey in this order, you will know. And the most important thing about that 150. is you'll know which of the 150 you care about and which you can't be bothered with and you're scaling because nobody's nobody's quite the same you'll know which subset are the ones that really really are your your believers i love that because that's that's then going to give you the data that you probably need to to have an easier life in the long run yeah because otherwise you're just trusting your instincts entirely there's a really brilliant saying that i've i read recently and it was something like in god we trust but everyone else needs to bring data and that's really the truth you have to go and get knowledge get out there talk to people that purport to be your customers or you think will be your customers and get actual knowledge about how they behave and what they care about and you know the the thing i'm trying to get across today dean is the best measure is they pay you. And so what happens typically then? What are some of the things that are the typical mistakes that people kind of make? So, I mean, you come across all sorts of people. Some of them you work with, some of them you don't work with, but typically they're not coming to you because everything's perfect, right? So, yeah. So what are the kind of pitfalls that they have? um you know is there anything else that comes into that other than i mean i could probably just play the typical journey yeah i'll replay the typical journey founder has an idea but the idea is the idea is actually born of an insight they're in a situation it may be a market they've worked in for a long time or a domain they understand really well or they just been involved with something and spotted a real problem a genuine problem And they think, wow, this could actually be a business. This could be a business. So they go from insight to idea. What if I made this? And that's where things start to break down, unfortunately. Because what will happen is, because the idea came from you, it kind of becomes part of your identity. You relate to it in a way where you think, if my idea is stupid, maybe I'm stupid. Which is not true, but that's where you go emotionally or it happens subconsciously. So you fall in love with your own idea. Then the next thing you think that people will typically think is, I need to go and build it. So I need to find some money, try and talk to investors, borrow from friends and family, whatever, whatever, whatever, and get something built so I can get it out to market. Build my MVP. We've all heard this term, MVP. Yeah, the minimum viable product. And there's no Vs. There's no viability because they haven't talked to any blooming customers yet. Yeah. Let alone worked out the economics of it. Sure, they'll do some cash flow forecast that looks like it might make an investor happy with a nice hockey stick saying we're going to be worth a gazillion within five years. That's not business viability. That means nothing. But that's what people think. I need to build my MVP. How do I build my MVP? I sit down and have a really good think about it. And then I go to some developers. Now, unless you go to someone very high integrity, if you go to developers and say, I want to build this crazy spaceship, I'll tell you what they're not going to say. They're not going to say, no, we don't want you to pay us that much money. And they're also not going to say, this is a bad idea. We don't want to do this. You know, have you made sure you've actually got customs? How do you know this is going to work out? What's your ROI going to be? If you pay me 50, 100, 150, 200, whatever thousand pounds to build your thing, how do I know I won't have built what you wanted but not what you needed? This is kind of the same conversation that I had a few years back and I was helping a company to, they wanted to create an app. and so they were talking to well let's go to the developers and um the conversation was around that we were having i was saying to the guys was that um there's what the developers are putting forward to build but then there's also it feels like if you said to them build a car they'd build a car with like a house on top and then you know it doesn't mean that that's going to work because they don't have the business experience that viability experience so perhaps we need to put a lens on that of how that you know that there needs to be a responsibility from the business side of things to the viability of that you know and it's a sound similar to um so what you're describing there is that you know that course they're going to do it of course they're going to build it it's you know because it's it's money right we're all in business um they're not always going to say but now i wouldn't do that in fact I suppose very similar, like, you know, I've always used the theory of car garages. You know, if I go to a car garage and I say to them, I think I need my tyres changing and they say, no, no, no, Dean, don't worry about that. You probably get another couple of months out of those and probably about 100 miles. Don't pay me now. And then they let me walk away. Like, who am I coming back to for everything in the future? That one or the one that, you know, just does what you ask them to do, you know? So do you see a lot of that? The irony from the supplier side, and there's so many things about the way the typical development agency works that I find personally, I don't know, infuriating is maybe the word. Yeah. But one of the, you know, one of the ironies of the way these things work is that I have found personally that if you say to a customer, look, if I were in your shoes, I wouldn't do it like this. And actually, I don't really want you to pay me. and then I do a bunch of stuff that wasn't valuable for you in the end. You'd be amazed at how customers feel about that. Nobody has ever said to me, oh, I can't believe you don't believe in my idea and you don't want my money. Most of them say, wow, this person is actually trying to help me. And they come back later. They'll come back later. And it's not a sales trick, Dean. It's integrity. Well, it's about if you genuinely want to help people or if you want to take something. There's two mindsets. And them feeling that, them knowing this is the person who wants to help me. And that's where I come from because I do want to actually help. So that's an irony from the supply side is they actually scupper themselves to a certain extent by behaving the way they do. But there's a whole bunch of other stuff around that. So the first thing is it's always time and materials, Dean. And I rail against time and materials. You know, if you called a builder or a plumber or an electrician and say, can you fix this problem for me? How much do you think it's going to cost? And they say, I don't know. Why don't I go one hour at a time and see what the bill ends up being? I think you tell them where to go. Yeah. Yeah. You tell them where to go. But we accept it in software and in law for that matter. but we accept it in software. Why? Because it's the done thing. Well, we don't really know. Nobody can predict anything there is ever to know about software and how it will turn out and whatever. People change their minds. And that's when you get into agile, the other thing I sort of rail against, which protects, it's positioned as protecting the founder. Well, you can change your mind as we go and it will be fine. We can adjust. But it doesn't. Do you want to explain what you mean by agile in the context? Yeah. So in the context of software development, it essentially means we're not going to commit to a whole bunch of stuff. We're going to go kind of two weeks at a time, prioritize things. Maybe we'll come up with a whole list of features. But we're going to go two weeks at a time and deliver things two weeks at a time. and the order in which we deliver that's another thing I'll talk about in a minute but every two weeks you look at where we are and you go you sign off and we're happy every two weeks we're happy that sounds really good doesn't it that sounds like yeah great you know I've got flexibility here and if I change my mind or I need to reprioritize or whatever but what it actually achieves is it allows the agency When you're six months down the line and say, guys, we've built the wrong bloody thing here. They can say, well, you agreed to it two weeks at a time. It's not our fault. It's kind of like in the older waterfall days, hitting you over the head with the scope document. Yeah. So, well, that's what you agreed to. Those are the requirements. If you got them wrong, that's kind of on you. Is that true? Sort of. It is sort of true. You're the customer. And ultimately, if you say, no, this is what I want, what's a supplier to do? But the problem is with software is the customer is expected to mainly write and understand the scope, and they actually don't necessarily have the skills to write a good spec or good scope for software. There's some counterintuitive elements. What should happen is the experts, typically the supplier, should enter your world and say, let me understand this as well as you do. Yeah. And let me write something that I think you would actually need, will actually benefit you. And make that, given that you've got limited funding and whatever right now, let's be really, really brutal about what you actually have to do right now. Yeah. And the reality is nobody does that. Nobody does that. Everyone's terrified of shooting themselves in the foot in terms of generating revenue on some particular contract or whatever. If a customer turns up and says, I want to spend 150K with you, how many people will survive internally by saying, I know the customer wants to spend 150K, but I told them to spend 25? In a typical agency with sales targets and whatever, you would be crucified. Yeah, but then there is always a different perspective, isn't there? And so that kind of brings me to the question of, they don't work that way because it's safer and easier for them to not work that way. And nobody's forcing them to work that way, clearly. So how does that turn around then? How can we change that for those people listening? Well, I think it's a tough one. Can you change the way those agencies think? I'm not sure you can. I think what you can do is prove that a better model can actually work, which is what I think Megaslice is about. But if I keep with the journey, you do that, you engage someone, you're working on something, you're building this thing. In the process of building, you then experience other headaches. So anyone who's ever commissioned some software will know the old bait and switch. we have a fantastic salesperson and a senior person during the sales process he says yeah we can do all these things it's going to be fantastic then when you sign the contract you get handed over to a project manager who seems to have an army of inexperienced or uncommunicative people um and you just think this conversation just changed this this whole dynamic just changed i don't feel like i'm getting through to anybody that you get the sort of teeth sucking mechanic crew. And I'm an engineer and I love engineering and I get along with engineers very well. But I also know very well what engineers are like. And I can tell you that a lot of people get into software engineering, it's more fun to talk to the computers than it is to talk to the people. And if that is your personality, you can only imagine. when you have a messy, chaotic, ideas-oriented, you know, founder, he turns up and says all this wacky stuff and you're like, oh, bloody hell. Now, can you just tell me what you want me to do? Can you just make sense? So then you struggle to get along with the founder. The founder struggles to get along with you. So everyone thinks, let's stick a project manager in the middle to media. And guess what, Dean? And most of the time, the project manager doesn't understand engineering and they also don't understand the customer's domain says like what yeah who is this person all they are is a barrier and a sort of gatekeeper to the engineers and one would imagine almost a chinese whisperer oh yeah mistranslating things all the time and but essentially a gatekeeper their job is to make sure that If the agency incurs any cost on engineering time that it's paid for, it's limited, it's within scope, it's this, that, and the other. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying those things aren't important. An agency is a business as well, and they won't be there to help anybody if they're not working within reasonable costs and all that sort of thing. I'm not railing against any of that. I'm just telling you that from a founder's perspective, that is what it feels like. It feels like you just got someone put in front of you. who doesn't have a scoobies about what you're trying to do, kind of doesn't care because it's not their job to care. Their job is to police the scope that you've agreed. And doesn't understand what the engineers are doing. So can't really judge whether what they're about to do is the right thing. That leads us into the next thing, which is just over-engineering. Over-engineering, and it speaks to the scalability point. Okay, we're going to build this software. It has to be... See if they care about the promise at all. Actually, you should establish that before you build anything. Yeah. Yeah. But if you put something in front of someone, sure, it might have some hiccups. But if the value is there for them, they will persist. If I said to you, how many apps do you use in your life that are or how many devices or services or whatever do you use that are terrible, really? But you need them. Yeah. And if people will buy them. Well. you know yeah um so so nobody probably so that doesn't happen that sort of what are we actually what actually matters right now that doesn't happen none of that happens um and then it all gets out then and by the time it's all over you've spent probably a lot of your money a lot of your time other people's money you've got a thing now and the customers are not biting and you're starting to think did i build the wrong thing I have the wrong customers. And now imagine you're all that spend and all that time down the line. Now what? And Rob Snyder calls this the pain cave. Because all these horrible questions come out. And the worst question is, is it me? Is it me? Am I just not cut out for this? Do I know what I'm doing? Am I taking a massive gamble here? That's when all the cognitive dissonance comes in. It's an awful place to be for a founder. And I think everything that Megaslice tries to do is about not doing any of that. Interesting. And I think, you know, I mean, I mix a lot with founders and obviously the audience are going to be probably majority founders and builders. But that's incredibly common and also very common high percentages of people that don't have the know-how of how to sell or what to do around that. And so the ideas part is almost really interesting. Like if I was to scroll Facebook groups for, you know, the groups you get with investors and, you know, entrepreneurs and those kind of groups. If I look on LinkedIn, you know, I could see some groups where there's, I've got this great big idea. I'm looking for an investor to bring the money and the sales, you know, and that you could find hundreds of thousands of those. Like, I think lots of people would have some great ideas, but actually doing that journey that you've just talked about requires a whole other load of skill sets in between to get from A to B, which is probably why more than two thirds of them never deliver a return. So what's your thoughts on that? Like the other skill sets like that? that people need to bring and do you help with that like for those founders when you say other skill sets do you mean trying to to pitch to investors and and raise money and or trying to to market what do you mean specifically sorry it might be around um so you know they've got the idea and they've started to get some customers you know how do they get the customers is is probably the first level of yes that's gonna be a huge problem for someone and then as you go through like you say okay i want to find some investors How do we find the investors? That's the next skill set that, you know, it seems easy, right? So now it's selling really well. Let's get an investor on board. Okay. Well, where the hell do we start? Because nobody is a professional at sales, getting investors, marketing. They're likely not going to have those skill sets. Well, certainly first time founders or early stage founders don't necessarily know how to do those things. But there is a ton of information on how to do it well. And I think what we certainly we try to do in our practice is bring it all together in one place. Yeah. So that exactly what you're saying that are you going to find all of those in one place is I think precisely what we try to do. That's that is our model. But if you're talking about things like, you know, how do I go out there and and find my first customers? A lot of the time when I talk to founders at that stage, I will just tell them, go and do it. You don't need to pay anybody, not even me. Just go and do this. Go and do this and see what happens. It's not going to hurt you. I think I know the answer. I'm going to ask you a leading question because there's the whole AI thing that's in the room around. you know how people can build products and the whole the whole kind of vibe coding thing um we talked about you know how do you sell well you know you could open up gemini or a chat gpt it tell you exactly how to sell you know what is psychological selling like how would i find the people how do i write the email so if it would almost write it for you right um how do i find the investors give you some ideas But that's what people are going to be thinking, you know, the smart, the smart Alex is who you are. Yeah, well, I'll just use AI. But actually, that's not true, is it? Because there's a whole lot of skill set in there and gut feeling and know how in terms of people who buy from people. So what's your thoughts on that? Because if you go to AI or Gemini or whatever and say. Here are the people I want to sell to. Help me write my cold email campaign. Help me do this. Help me do that. You're just going to fall on your face. And the reason is because, see if I can explain this so it's really obvious and intuitive. Let's say I'm making a product for mechanics. I'm looking at the cars driving outside. I make a product for mechanics. It's a product that will help you run your mechanic shop better. Yeah. If I go to Gemini and say, what are the troubles that mechanics have? It might know something. OK, so how do I reach them? It might know something, whatever. Compare that to I'm going to sit and watch you do what you do, Mr. or Mrs. Mechanic, for like three days. I'm just going to sit and watch what you do and how you do it and how you use your phone and how you use your computer and how you do your paperwork and whatever. I'm just going to watch you do it all. And what's a pain? what you're doing late at night, what you're spending time on, I guarantee you do that for enough people for enough time, you'll walk away and you'll see things that there's no way you would have got out of Gemini. One of the things I tell my own staff is you can walk into any type of business anywhere and just shadow them for a month and you'll walk away thinking this is crazy. I can't believe people work like this. I can't believe people do things this way. As a technologist, you'll walk in and you'll see that. Gemini's not going to give you that because what that requires, apart from seeing the little details that nobody else is paying attention to, you can't, Gemini's not empathising with anyone. How does it know what's painful? You know because you're there watching someone saying, God, I can't believe I have to do this again. What do you think in terms of vibe coding? What's your thoughts on that? I think it's incredibly valuable, incredibly valuable. But what for specific things? For building a product that you think is going to be the product? No. The technology is not there yet. And it makes some horrible mistakes. And if you're non-technical, you've got no real idea what's going on in the foundations. You don't really want to build your whole business on it. It's a mistake. What it is fantastic for is whipping something up to put in front of people so they can have a play and you can see how it reacts to it. It is great for that. Truly great. It's also great for you to figure out your own views on things. Let's go back to the model I was describing. I've got a service and now I'm like, okay, do you know what, Dean? You're using my service. I've been talking to you on the phone and email. I want to put something in front of you and I want you to use that instead. It could be one screen, one screen. And I send it to you. And not only do I send it to you, I send it to you and say, can I watch you try to use it? And you sit there flubbing around and you're like, I don't understand what this means and whatever. I'm going to be like, oh, crap. OK, that's vibe coding is great for that. Really, really great for that. I'm just going to make one little tool that's a little bit more producty and put it in front of you and watch you try to use it. It's really fantastic for that. Because you can iterate it quickly. Sometimes you can change it right then and there. If you're in a great relationship with a customer where it all feels like you're all part of the same team at this moment, we're all part of this journey to make the world better in some way, you can sit down with them and if they go, oh, that doesn't really work very well, change it real quick. What about that? Does that feel better? Does this feel better? You can iterate that. Then if you take that to someone. What about Vibe coding with developers? Does it allow them to move quicker? Yes, definitely. I mean, I would say that any development team that hasn't taught themselves to use AI code generation effectively, that's a whole different topic. Using it effectively is a whole different topic by itself. I'm just going to get left behind. Yeah. I'll give you an example of a... friend of mine who built a product and they were building an app that was based around when someone passes away often it's hard to capture their memories and so they could be captured when they're alive so the whole app's premise was that you know a bit of a this is my life and audience you know all of the images all of the videos and the stories of like when i was 15 and i did this that they've never told the family you know the kind of the life story goes into an app but then it's not like a book where you know the pages just fall away and so it's something that you can almost capture the family tree but also you can you can have those special memories where you can relive or you can 50 years later give it to your your great grandchild and say oh look this was what your nan was or you know those kind of things so it's really lovely app in terms of the sentiment they must have spent a lot of money maybe 100 grand or something And again, you know, the apps, it's not quite fit. It's not quite ready. But then they went to a developer who uses AI too. And that developer was able to unscrabble the faults and the errors and feed them back relatively quickly, a fully working app that's ready to launch, which is a wonderful story because they felt like they... you know just get let down and let down by one after the other and didn't know where to turn and someone comes along but they openly admitted they were using AI as well as their typical skills so that's something you feel that's probably going to be common ground that there'll be a mixture of both but I suppose then for Joe Public is it just that they don't understand the coding in the background which is where the problems can lie? Yeah, I think I'm going to talk about the current state of the technology because who knows where it's going to be in six months or 12 months. It's moving so rapidly. At the moment, the people who use it most effectively are the people who can verify what it's produced and say, no, that shouldn't be architected like that. No, that shouldn't work like that. It's moving them quicker. They can move quicker and fix things quicker, but they can verify the output. If you don't understand the output, you don't know if it's going down this very deep and terrible rabbit hole until it gets stuck or until something really bad happens. I'm sure you saw that Twitter thread or that X thread where someone was kind of mouthing off saying, oh, developers are obsolete. I've just built all this myself. This is great. I can't believe anyone does anything any other way. Software development is dead. And then literally a week later, it was help. I've been hacked. All my data has been stolen. I don't know what to do. The AI is not cooperating. I've threatened it. I've done everything. I shouldn't laugh. Yeah, it's funny. Of course. And I don't think, I feel for the guy because I don't think he was being arrogant. I think what happened is, it's kind of, there's a bit of a collective sigh at the moment. It comes back to what we were talking about earlier. it is such a monumental pain in the ass to work with a typical development team who are not customer oriented and not business oriented yeah people use these tools and think wow this is just i don't want to go back i don't want to go back i'd rather take the risk than go back yeah unfortunately that you know the the real truth and value is in the middle somewhere yeah You don't want a shocking development team, but you also don't want this pure AI model where actually it's going to produce a massive mess. Yeah. Customers using or, you know, you built a business on and you're stuck with it. Yeah, I get it. The same is true in the marketing space. You know, there's kind of there's the old school and then and then there's, you know, well, I can just use AI. I can get what you do for 50 quid. OK, well, go on then. You know, that's that's good. But if everyone's doing that, then it just becomes a load of tat and it becomes a bit samey. And actually, you know, people are damaging their brand by doing that. What makes marketing great is that beautiful kind of imagination and creativity and gut feeling only humans can add. So it's kind of somewhere in the middle. It's probably 70% AI. Because why would you move slowly when you can do all the research with AI? You can do parts with AI as long as you sense check. Again, you know, conceptualization. If you are doing something, sure, at some point you want to, you know, let's say you're creating some image assets or whatever. If something can help you iterate quicker, just use it. Why not? Just use it. I think railing against, you know, especially in the design space, railing against AI Gen. As a designer, if you're a designer using it, railing against it because now you're not moving the pixels around by yourself. It's kind of like getting mad that... Photoshop does content the way I feel. It's like, why would you be mad about that? Like, just get over with. So thinking about what you do then, because I feel like anyone who's just about to go on this journey has got a lot of kind of tips and from this conversation anyhow. But, you know, what what are the kind of things that we might have left out you think would be really valuable for anybody who's looking to do this? And and and also, you know, if somebody is about to do this and this has raised some questions for them you know what's the process through your business when when you look to to work with somebody what actually happens um two questions there really i'm i'm kind of going to use your um the example you gave which is this um kind of legacy memories thing yeah just as a worked example if they came up to me and say this is the idea the first thing i'd say is okay so who's it for Is it for younger people? Is it for older people who kind of feel like their time is coming or something's going to be lost? Is it for important people who feel like they haven't captured everything? Or people who've been on a journey, people who have had a long journey or feel like they've got interesting stories to tell? Who's it for? Narrow it down. Tell me, bring me somebody that you can tell me is interested. And if they haven't figured that out, I'll be like, go and do that. Go and do that first. right go go out there and say so how do you preserve your legacy right now are you worried about you know what are you doing about it now and if you if some people say well nothing really they're not really your then you've got to examine the idea or whether that you've spoken to the right person so you need to do that journey first then let's say we latch on to somebody again i'm going to completely make this up because we're in this this conversation now and i don't actually know the problem that well but suppose it's I've realized that the people who really care about something like this are military veterans who've done some tours and been through some stuff and they really care and they want a tour. Let's say that's my niche, right? I made it up completely. The next thing I would say is that's great. Now go to them and say, how much would you charge for your product? Oh, I'd charge five pounds a month. Okay, great. Here's what you're going to do. You're going to go to them and say, if you give me a fiver, I am going to... Take all of your memories myself and I'm going to preserve them and put them in this beautiful thing thing or whatever it is you're gonna do But I'm gonna do and we're gonna figure out how that happens If you can't sell that for a fiver if they go well, I don't know. I don't really want to blah blah blah What are you doing? Yeah, what are you doing now? Let's say they bite someone goes bloody hell. That's a bargain. Yeah, okay What's going to happen next, Dean? In the act of trying to do it, you're going to find out what it takes. Where are all these memories? How much of it is you just sitting down with them and listening to their stories? Are they prepared for you to film them? I don't know. But you're going to have to do it, aren't you? Work out how you collect it. Work out how you collect it. And then let's say you work out, oh, it turns out... that my military veterans um it turns out they take a lot of photos and preserve a lot of photos and they got these albums full of stuff yeah so then i go back and say look i've just made this a bit easier can you take your phone and take some pictures i'm going to give you one little tool take some pictures of stuff and upload it here and then i'll do the rest what's the minimum thing vibe coding is great for that the minimum thing I need to do to make that work now you're starting to look like you're building product that's true agile that's now you're starting to build your little product bit by bit by bit but you're interfaced with the customer and if you're dealing with your first five or ten customers Dean guess what you have a relationship with them yeah so you're really learning and if you do a great job let's say you've got a brand you know your brand is called Tenacious I'm just going to leverage your name They'll say, oh, Tenacious are brilliant. And they're going to talk to their mates and say, you should use Tenacious. Yeah. And you see how natural that feels. How natural does that feel? It just, it feels like you don't, you're not trying. It's just happening. And that's what you want. And if you get your 150, you know, the priestly idea, you get your 150 veterans who absolutely love you. And they're talking about you and all the veterans networks and you can go to all the veteran meetups and whatever. Everyone loves you and they're clamoring for your service. And you start to think, I can't do all of this the way I'm doing it right now. I promise you, you go to an angel investor and say, I'm swimming in traction. I need to build something. Otherwise I can't cope. And someone's going to give you the money. Someone's going to give you the money because before that, if you've got nobody, It's much harder to raise the money. And I always say to founders, you want someone to give you 150K. Do you have a house? Yes, I have a house. OK, why don't you remortgage your house and spend your own money? And they will know immediately why they don't want to spend their own money. What if it doesn't work? Yeah. Yeah. But guess what? If they go on the journey I've just described to you, Dean, they might well remortgage their house. They might feel a bit more confident. Yeah, I think I said, I need the money. I know I'm going to make the money. I know I'm going to make money here. I love that. And people are going to find it so useful. Do you know what? Where my mind when you just read, when you were talking about military and my granddad just passed away recently. He was 92. Without taking the, I'm not going to cry, don't worry. But he was a veteran in the Korean War. So when you brought up military, I started thinking of him. It was really lovely, like the kind of like the memories. If I was doing this for him and I was going to pass on a memory. He had at the funeral, his daughter read out a speech and it was written for her. And she didn't know that the Korean embassy had written a letter to him to thank him for fighting in their war. and to say how wonderful it was that someone who didn't know them, who had no interest to fight for them, would come over and fight for them and gave like a medal. And that was just so warming, like such a lovely thing. So I was thinking of that when you mentioned military. So I'll give him a mention. That niche, you know, if you look at it from a marketing perspective, D, and I mean it in the sort of abstract sense rather than promotion per se, right? If I walk into the room and say, oh, I've got this thing and you can put all your memories in it and whatever. And I'm talking to a veteran. They might be like, oh, that's kind of interesting. Yeah, I might think about that. If I say to them, I have made something because I have realized that military veterans have the best stories and you're so full of stories. And I built this because I'm worried that we're going to lose all of that and that your family won't know all these things that you've done. So I'm going to work with you and I'm going to get all of that in one place as much or as little as you're comfortable with. But I've made this for veterans. And you're going to do it for a fiver, Justin. That's fantastic. I'm going to do it for a fiver. It sounds like, you know, do you see how it sounds? It's the same damn thing, Dean. But it sounds different. Yeah. It now sounds relevant. It sounds relevant. And when I walk into a room with a military veteran. especially if I say oh by the way the way it works is even things like pictures of your medals like it will identify what the medals are and what the significance of that medal is and it will show up on the screen that's a tiny little not stupid feature but it's a little feature that's relevant to military veterans and not to everyone else but they'll be like wow I can take a picture of your flash and it will tell me those colors mean this, that colors mean that, this colors mean that, this means I fought here, this means I did this, this means I was awarded that. And the people in my family who don't know what all that stuff means, and I can connect a story to each one of those so they can click it and see a little video and I'm going to tell the story of why I was awarded that. Yeah. It suddenly sounds hyper relevant. Yeah. Hyper relevant. And that is how, that is. kind of as a worked example i've totally made it up because you could go out there talk to military veterans and they could tell you to get lost i'm not interested yeah um but that's the kind of journey that the founder needs to go on before building a single piece of tech that is um great advice i think um our viewers are going to get a lot from this conversation justin so i really appreciate having you here um no problem at all I can put some details in the comments. Should I pop your LinkedIn and company website in there? Would that work? Thank you so much. Yeah. And yeah, just an absolute pleasure. I'll probably reach out at some stage to have a one-to-one, discuss a couple of ideas that I might have. Sure. Sounds good to me. Thanks for having me on. Have a wonderful day. You too. Speak soon. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye.

Stop building and start selling.

This is the non-technical founder’s guide to SaaS success.

Are you sitting on a “killer” app idea?

Before you hire a developer, brief an agency, or write a single line of code, you need to understand the brutal truth:

If you build it, they probably will not come.

In this episode of Build With Dean, Dean Whitby sits down with Justin Megawarne, founder of Megaslice, to break down why so many SaaS ideas fail before they ever get traction, and what non-technical founders should do instead.

This conversation challenges the “Field of Dreams” myth and explains why validation, sales, waiting lists and customer insight matter more than rushing into product development.

You’ll learn:

Why many startups fail because there is no real market need
Why your MVP might be neither minimum nor viable
Why founders should validate demand before building software
The 150-customer rule and why waiting lists matter
How concierge validation lets you sell the outcome manually before the tech exists
Why “agile” and “time and materials” can protect the supplier more than the founder
How to avoid getting burned by development agencies
How to use AI and vibe coding to iterate fast without weakening the foundations
Why hyper-relevance helps you find a niche that actually pays
How to avoid over-engineering your way into the pain cave

If you are a domain expert with a vision but no technical background, this episode is your roadmap for building a business that lasts, not just a product that sits on a shelf.

Key takeaways for non-technical founders:

Validate first, build second
Do not build anything you have not sold yet
Build a waiting list before hiring developers
Start with service before software
Narrow your niche until people feel like you are speaking directly to them
Be careful with open-ended development costs
Verify AI-generated code before relying on it
Focus limited resources on one clear market

Guest links:

Megaslice
https://megaslice.uk

Justin Megawarne LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmegawarne/

At Tenacious AI Marketing Global, we help founders, executives and B2B businesses build visibility, authority and demand through AEO, GEO, LinkedIn marketing, personal branding, YouTube, AI agent building, automations and AI visibility strategies.

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