In this episode of Grow & Learn, host Zorina Dimitrova talks with David Hirschfeld about his innovative Launch 1st methodology. This approach empowers startups to launch their software ventures without relying on external funding. David draws on his extensive 35-year career to emphasize the critical role of early product-market fit validation. He advocates for using high-fidelity design prototypes and pre-launch sales as essential strategies in this process. The discussion covers how Launch 1st minimizes risk, accelerates pivots, and ensures financial efficiency by generating revenue before full-scale development. David also emphasizes the importance of niche analysis, strategic marketing, and legal considerations for startup success.
Tired of endless fundraising?
Launching a software company traditionally involves a grueling fundraising process. Imagine bypassing traditional development processes entirely and launching directly into the market, allowing you to start generating revenue even before your product is built. The Launch 1st methodology, crafted by David Hirschfeld—a software veteran with over 35 years of industry experience—embodies a powerful promise. In this episode of the Grow & Learn podcast, David discusses his unique method for reducing risks in software startups and gaining early market validation.
What is Launch 1st?
Launch First isn’t about building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Instead, it focuses on creating a high-fidelity prototype that looks and acts like the finished product. This prototype vividly highlights the complete vision of your software, featuring a comprehensive two-year roadmap of functionalities brought to life through dynamic animations and realistic data interactions. This allows you to demonstrate the full potential of your software without investing in costly development upfront.
Validating Your Market Before You Build
The core of Launch First is pre-launch sales. Armed with your high-fidelity prototype, you go directly to your target market, specifically focusing on identifying early adopters. This requires a detailed analysis to identify customers facing significant problems that they believe are impactful. This allows you to tailor your messaging and demonstrate the value proposition effectively. By securing pre-launch sales, you validate market demand and generate revenue to fuel development.
Pivoting Without Pain
One of the most significant advantages of Launch First is the ability to pivot quickly and cheaply. If your initial pre-launch sales efforts don’t meet expectations, you can easily adjust your messaging, workflows, or the prototype within weeks. This iterative method helps you improve your product and achieve product-market fit before making significant development investments, unlike traditional MVP approaches where changes can be expensive and slow.
The Benefits of Launching First.
Launch First offers several compelling benefits for software startups:
No need for initial investment: Generate revenue before building your product.
Faster time to market: Start selling within months, not years.
Reduced risk: Validate market demand and avoid costly development mistakes.
Stronger investor pitch: Demonstrate traction and revenue growth to attract investors later.
Fail fast and cheap: If your product isn’t viable, you’ll know early on without significant economic loss.
A Smarter Way to Launch
The Launch 1st methodology provides a new way to start software companies. Startups can skip traditional fundraising by focusing on pre-launch sales and high-quality prototypes. This approach helps them validate their market and generate revenue before incurring expensive development costs. This de-risked approach allows for faster time to market, increased flexibility, and a higher chance of success.
[0:05–0:28] Zorina Dimitrova: Hi, I’m Zorina Dimitrova and welcome to the Grow & Learn podcast. Here I host thought leaders on business growth, transformation, leadership and succeeding in life and business with a human focus. At Grow & Learn, we are the only ones offering uniquely customized solutions to business needs using a cutting-edge AI business growth assessment tool and a global network of top-tier experts to craft and execute strategies that drive impactful results.
[0:28–0:56] Zorina Dimitrova: If you’re ready to grow smarter, book a call today at growandlearn.org and let’s transform your business together. Enjoy this episode. I’m welcoming my first guest for 2025, David Hirschfeld. We’re going to be speaking about launching software companies without the need for investment, launching them successfully, how to circumvent all the pitfalls on the way to success for growing a startup.
[0:56–1:01] Zorina Dimitrova: Welcome, David. Very glad to have you as my first guest this year.
[1:02–1:05] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, thank you for having me, Zarin. I’m really excited to speak with you.
[1:05–1:23] Zorina Dimitrova: My pleasure. I’m very interested in the methodology you’ve developed as a part of your product and hearing your story of how you got there. So, would you like sharing a bit about you, how you came up with Launch First and what it is actually?
[1:24–1:37] David Hirschfeld: Sure. I’ll give you a little background. So without getting into a whole history lesson here, I’ve been involved with software development now for 35-plus years.
[1:38–1:49] David Hirschfeld: Started out in the enterprise with Texas Instruments and Computer Associates, and then did project management work at Intel, Motorola, Allied Signal, Arizona Public Service.
[1:49–2:01] David Hirschfeld: And so I was very enterprise-oriented in the early part of my career. And then in the early 90s, started my first software company with an associate from Texas Instruments.
[2:01–2:13] David Hirschfeld: And it was in logistics route distribution and inventory management. And our idea was to pick a small niche in that industry and to create software.
[2:13–2:26] David Hirschfeld: It wasn’t with the idea that we were going to build a big software company. We just wanted to sort of get our feet wet with a software product. And Windows 3.1 had just come out. It was the first version of Windows that was really usable.
[2:26–2:41] David Hirschfeld: And so we built a Windows product in that industry. And despite every effort on both our parts, we ended up growing the company anyway to 800 customers in 22 countries over the next eight years and sold it to a publicly traded firm.
[2:41–2:56] David Hirschfeld: So I had a successful exit. And so now I’m thinking I know what it takes to start a software company. I was VP of products for the acquiring company for the next several years until I left there and then started Tekyz a couple years later.
[2:57–3:11] David Hirschfeld: And with Tekyz, we worked with a lot of startup companies, over close to 90 startups now. The problem with startups is most of them fail because they lack product market fit.
[3:11–3:28] David Hirschfeld: and the reasons I was successful in my first venture were not the reasons I thought I was successful and I didn’t realize that until I’d worked with several dozen software companies and watched them fail for reasons that I would not have expected.
[3:30–3:43] David Hirschfeld: Most of them just wait way too long to start to try to sell their product and get revenue from customers and there’s no way to validate product market fit without getting financial, without customers paying it.
[3:44–4:00] David Hirschfeld: You can’t rely on people saying, I’d use your software if it was out, because you don’t know if they really would when it comes to actually having to write a check to use your software until you have a product that people are starting to pay for.
[4:00–4:30] David Hirschfeld: so I came up with launch first as a way of preventing my potential customers from failing by and and what we do is we create these really sophisticated designs that are animated and look like finished product but they’re not they’re just animated designs so we go to the market with these designs, and we also go through a very extensive niche analysis process to figure out who that
[4:30–4:44] David Hirschfeld: early adopter is. And then we build a marketing stack based on how we expect to be able to sell the product, and then we create a high-value opportunity to buy into this product early.
[4:44–4:58] David Hirschfeld: And if you’re solving a big enough problem that the customer feels it impacts them a lot and it costs them a lot. Those are two independent numbers that we validate during the niche analysis process.
[4:59–5:11] David Hirschfeld: And you’re giving them a big enough value offer up front that they’re afraid they’ll miss out on it if they don’t buy in now and they know they’re going to buy the software once it is available.
[5:11–5:35] David Hirschfeld: Then you can sell it even before you start building the product in enough numbers to get what I pass what I call a viability barrier. and a viability barrier is that you’re selling enough product at a high enough closing ratio for a high enough price that you can track a three-to-one ratio between your lifetime value of that customer versus what it costs to acquire that customer.
[5:36–5:50] David Hirschfeld: That’s sort of the golden ratio for SaaS companies, three-to-one. And you need that margin because to scale, you have to have enough margin in there to be able to reinvest back into your company.
[5:51–6:03] David Hirschfeld: So the cool thing about Launch First is once you find that, well, a couple of cool things. One is let’s say you don’t get to that three-to-one ratio the first time you go out and you try to do your pre-launch sales.
[6:03–6:36] David Hirschfeld: Well, we pivot, and pivoting is a two- or three-week process when you’re talking about a design prototype and a marketing stack, changing your messaging, changing some of the workflows based on feedback back that you’re getting when you’re trying to sell it for the reasons that people aren’t buying it yet. We can pivot two or three or four times in the space of a couple months. Once you build your product, pivoting is costly and painful. And doing a really significant pivot, there’s a lot of
[6:36–6:48] David Hirschfeld: momentum against doing that because of the cost. And you’re in panic mode usually by the time you start pivoting in a startup once you’ve built your product. But with Launch First, it’s not like that.
[6:49–7:04] David Hirschfeld: We can pivot quickly and retest the market with different messaging, different workflows, different demonstration. And once we find that magic balance and we’re starting to sell at that rate that we need, that’s the trigger to start building the product.
[7:05–7:07] David Hirschfeld: And you don’t stop selling. Yeah, go ahead.
[7:07–7:23] Zorina Dimitrova: Would you allow me to backtrack a little bit and maybe reiterate what exactly you’re doing? I absolutely get it, but maybe to just make it clearer for the audience that kind of didn’t quite catch it.
[7:24–7:38] Zorina Dimitrova: So what you developed is a process through which you can take companies to market or rather work with a minimum viable product before they have actually designed their software product.
[7:38–7:41] Zorina Dimitrova: You’re working only with task companies, software companies.
[7:41–7:53] David Hirschfeld: Yes, but not a minimum viable product. The minimum viable product means, no, because that you have to build. Yeah, right. You’re building the software, and that’s costly and risky.
[7:54–8:06] David Hirschfeld: We’re not building an MVP. We’re creating a design prototype that looks and acts like the real product, not just a click-through mock-up. It’s beyond that, but it’s not the product.
[8:07–8:20] David Hirschfeld: And it shows the full vision of your product, not an MVP. Part of the problem with trying to sell your MVP is it’s so limited in functionality that people struggle to want to buy it because it doesn’t have enough features yet.
[8:21–8:29] David Hirschfeld: What we’re building is a design prototype that looks like you’ve already implemented the full two-year roadmap of your product.
[8:29–8:41] Zorina Dimitrova: And by a design prototype, just to clarify once again, you mean simply like a movie. You show them basically what it would look like if they enter, then use the software app or whatever they’re using.
[8:41–9:12] David Hirschfeld: Yes, sort of, except that you’re actually demoing it. If you clicking through it the behavior on screen is like the real product with data and drop lists The navigation the animation all of it looks like you built the product And this is a critical success factor for doing prelaunch sales because the one question you don’t want to get when you’re showing somebody something that you’re planning on building is how do I know you can build this?
[9:13–9:37] David Hirschfeld: Right. And if your product looks like just click-through mock-ups, that’s the first question you’ll get. But if you build it, what’s called a high-fidelity prototype, where it looks like a real product already, then even though you tell them this isn’t the real product and the first version may not have all these features and it’ll be three months out, people will make up a story in their minds because that doesn’t fit with what they’re saying.
[9:37–9:51] David Hirschfeld: They’ll think, oh, they must have developed it, but they’re in QA, just testing it now or finishing a few features, even though you never say any of that. You tell them the truth, but they don’t hear it because it looks so real.
[9:52–10:08] Zorina Dimitrova: How do you ensure that the software is built within the predefined deadline or timeframe? because usually the software, I know from experience and also talking to a lot of people, that there are a lot of promises in the software developing world.
[10:08–10:13] Zorina Dimitrova: It’s going to be done by that and that deadline, and it takes a year longer to develop.
[10:13–10:33] David Hirschfeld: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this has — and that’s really the right question to ask, to be honest with you. So if you go to Tekyz.com, you’ll see right at the top of the homepage, above the fold, it’ll say hyper-exceptional software development team.
[10:35–10:45] David Hirschfeld: That’s what we actually do is build software. But we’re not just the software development team. We’re really exceptional software development team. I say hyper-exceptional.
[10:45–11:08] David Hirschfeld: And I don’t just say that, but I always say to people, when somebody tells you they’re good at something, ask them for evidence. What does that mean? And we have all kinds of evidence about how we track projects, how we transparency, the level of detail when we do estimates, the accuracy of our estimates in terms of showing estimates versus actuals in our status reports.
[11:10–11:21] David Hirschfeld: And we’re within 10% of our estimates. that’s our goal is to always stay within 10% above or below. We don’t want to be any more above or below.
[11:21–11:35] David Hirschfeld: We don’t want to be 30% ahead because that means that we’re just sandbagging in the estimates. We don’t want to be behind because that just means that we didn’t consider all the functionality or the estimate wasn’t detailed enough.
[11:36–12:00] David Hirschfeld: It didn’t have enough knowledge in it. So we’re really good at it. And it’s funny because I talk with a lot of other software development companies, CEOs of other companies that do software development, and we talk about estimates, and very often I’ll hear, yeah, yeah, we always do pretty detailed estimates, and I ask them if they’d like to see how we do it, and they always say yes.
[12:00–12:11] David Hirschfeld: And then I show them how we do our estimates and what they look like, and they go, oh, no, we don’t do estimates like that. That takes way too much work and too expensive to get to that level. But we always do.
[12:12–12:17] David Hirschfeld: That’s one example. The way we run our status meetings.
[12:18–12:32] Zorina Dimitrova: So basically, with launch first, you have combined the software company with the business advisory model. So you’re in a way ensuring that the startup is succeeding.
[12:32–12:35] Zorina Dimitrova: So it’s like a mixture of a few businesses.
[12:35–13:09] David Hirschfeld: some people have called it a de-risking approach to starting a software company because what we’re doing is we’re mitigating most of the risks and giving the founder a much higher chance of being successful and in the case where they can’t find that path to that viability barrier, past the viability barrier, they’re just not able to do it, maybe it’s the wrong product or the wrong market at the wrong time,
[13:09–13:17] David Hirschfeld: then they can say, which every software company that failed wishes they could say this, they failed fast and cheap.
[13:18–13:18] : I see.
[13:19–13:31] Zorina Dimitrova: Instead of, yeah. Talking about cheap, I don’t know what the average investment is, generally speaking, for a startup in a software company.
[13:31–13:42] Zorina Dimitrova: but I know that your costs, or not your costs, but the costs the startup should expect are somewhere around 80K.
[13:43–13:45] David Hirschfeld: At a minimum. At a minimum.
[13:45–13:58] Zorina Dimitrova: Okay. 80K. How does it pay off for them? And is it comparable to the initial costs they would have? Were they to raise money or proceed in a different way?
[13:59–14:15] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, so that’s a good question. And when I say 80K is a minimum, I’m talking about getting a solid MVP out to market. That may not be a version that you can sell yet because what most people do is they’ll put out their MVP.
[14:17–14:29] David Hirschfeld: They’ll do free betas. They usually wait way too long to get the MVP out, and they keep adding features to it. But once the MVP is out, they rarely start charging for the software on the MVP.
[14:29–14:43] David Hirschfeld: They usually are doing free betas to get feedback from their customers, and their customers are giving them feedback, and these are customers that haven’t paid for the software yet. And it’s hard to get people to use your free MVP because they’re not invested in the software.
[14:44–14:55] David Hirschfeld: And there’s all kinds of problems with this approach. And very often that might be anywhere from 6 to 12 months to get the MVP out. This is typical. Not that it can happen faster, but typical.
[14:55–15:07] David Hirschfeld: Sometimes it’s even longer. And then it’s another year, usually with releases, you know, going back and forth with releases and feedback from customers before you feel the product’s got enough functionality.
[15:07–15:37] David Hirschfeld: Now you can start to charge for it. And that’s usually when they find out that people don’t want to buy it, two years after they’ve started. And now they’re in panic mode. So with doing with launch first, instead of waiting two years to start to sell your product and find out nobody wants to buy it, within three months, we’re out there marketing the product and very often starting to sell the product successfully and generating revenue.
[15:37–16:03] David Hirschfeld: And one of the things I try to convince people of is give a very high-value purchase opportunity. That might be a lifetime license, or it might be free implementation in the case of something like a CRM or an ERP product or a clinical trial software, you know, bigger software products where the implementation costs are more than the actual software itself.
[16:03–16:15] David Hirschfeld: or whatever the high-value trigger is that the buyer would perceive as being high enough value that it’s worth them taking a risk on something that isn’t built yet.
[16:16–16:33] David Hirschfeld: And by doing this, you can generate as much or more money from a fraction, a measurable fraction of percent of your market versus giving away 10%, 15%, 20% to investors.
[16:33–16:46] David Hirschfeld: And all the work you’re doing to sell these customers is all work you’re doing to build your business, designing the product, building your marketing engine, creating the sales and marketing message.
[16:46–16:57] David Hirschfeld: These are all things you have to do to build your business. Nothing you do to raise money is helping you build your business, creating pitch decks, going out and trying to get in front of investors and selling, right?
[16:57–17:18] David Hirschfeld: And then assuming you’re successful and you start selling your product now, which is the trigger to start building it, now if you do want to accelerate your growth and development, having a conversation by raising money, having conversation with investors is completely different because you can show traction, market traction.
[17:18–17:24] David Hirschfeld: You can show growing revenue, and you don’t even have a product on the market yet. Yeah.
[17:24–17:24] : Yeah.
[17:25–17:31] Zorina Dimitrova: How long does it take for the customer to get their product using this approach, for the final customer?
[17:32–17:40] David Hirschfeld: I usually tell people, figure, three months from the time we start. Yeah, well, to get to where we start to market, yeah.
[17:41–17:53] Zorina Dimitrova: No no I think the final developed product that the end customer of your customers is purchasing until the product is developed
[17:53–18:05] David Hirschfeld: Okay. So are we talking about the MVP? Because there’s no such thing as a final product if you sell something that’s successful. That’s the beginning once you put it on the market.
[18:05–18:07] Zorina Dimitrova: Well, what you’ve agreed to sell them to begin with.
[18:08–18:22] David Hirschfeld: Right. So we’ll talk about MVPs. So it depends on the market. It very much is very dependent on the market and the product and the level of sophistication. Typical product was probably four months to get an MVP done.
[18:23–18:33] David Hirschfeld: Anywhere from three to six months, I’ll say. Just, like I said, depends on level of sophistication. Some take nine to ten months to get an MVP done.
[18:34–18:44] David Hirschfeld: Some can be done in two and a half months. But that would be — that’s the typical — and there are some that are even longer than that, but these are really big, sophisticated products that have a lot of R&D involved.
[18:46–18:58] David Hirschfeld: Now, one of our favorite projects — again, this has to do with being an exceptional company as opposed to just a regular software development company — what I call recovery projects.
[18:58–19:13] David Hirschfeld: These are projects from customers who have been working at building their product very often because they were promised that the first version would be available in three months, and now it’s 18 months later.
[19:13–19:26] David Hirschfeld: They still don’t have anything to show, and what they do have is so buggy that they don’t trust it. I call those recovery projects. And sometimes we can just take the project with the code base that’s there and work forward.
[19:26–19:44] David Hirschfeld: Most of the time we have to start over. And we always do a full assessment with a very detailed report on the quality of the code and the architecture of the application and things like that so that the user can make an informed decision if they want to go forward with that.
[19:44–20:00] David Hirschfeld: But that’s very common. When you’re dealing with a typical software development company, it’s very hard to nail down when you’ll actually have something that you can start to give to customers that won’t embarrass you.
[20:01–20:11] David Hirschfeld: With us, when we put an estimate together, the estimates are accurate. But we spend a lot of time putting these estimates together, and those estimates don’t cost our customers anything.
[20:11–20:17] Zorina Dimitrova: Yeah. What is your success rate with helping startups launch software companies?
[20:19–20:36] David Hirschfeld: So what we’ve done with Launch First? Launch One First, yeah. With Launch First, right. With Launch First, with our first four projects that we did, three of them were successful, which is a really high percentage.
[20:36–20:47] David Hirschfeld: I’m not suggesting that we’re going to have 75% success rate with it. I figure it’ll be somewhere between 25% and 30% when we have a larger number pool of this.
[20:47–21:02] David Hirschfeld: But with our first four, one was a product that was for aerospace parts distributors, and this was a product that managed the certification certificates.
[21:02–21:12] David Hirschfeld: It’s every part that goes into an airplane or aerospace has to have a certificate that says this part, when it was made, what it was made of.
[21:12–21:26] David Hirschfeld: And if it’s an assembly of other parts, every one of those parts that went into it has to have its certificate with the new certificate. And so you can see this becomes a complicated process to manage.
[21:26–21:40] David Hirschfeld: And so this product was for that specific process. We did three demos to three parts distributors and sold all three of those demos for $15,000 each.
[21:41–21:56] David Hirschfeld: So in a space of a few weeks, raised $45,000 in prelaunch sales. For a real estate investment portfolio management product, we sold in two months, we sold 23 licenses for $68,000.
[21:56–22:10] David Hirschfeld: and these are not promises, but these are actual checks that we’re receiving for people buying in. And a third one was for clinical trial software product.
[22:10–22:22] David Hirschfeld: And we did two demos, sold both the licenses for $250,000 each. So raised $500,000 from two clinical trials.
[22:22–22:48] David Hirschfeld: and the fourth one was for housing, subsidized housing for Native Americans and that one we started right after the pandemic started and there was no way to get a hold of anybody, any Native American tribal authorities because the pandemic had shut everything down and so that one failed.
[22:48–22:55] David Hirschfeld: so that gives you an idea of the types of projects that are very successful with this
[22:55–23:08] Zorina Dimitrova: is there someone you or a company you you would say I cannot help you I cannot work with this type of company with this type of setting is there yeah
[23:08–23:26] David Hirschfeld: there are so one would be product like a public social network where anything that your business model is based on critical mass of users, that’s not going to work with Launch First.
[23:26–23:49] David Hirschfeld: That might work in a crowdfunding scenario. Or if you have a product that you’re marketing to the public in general and it’s a very low subscription fee, for example, that’s not going to work with launch first.
[23:49–24:05] David Hirschfeld: If you don’t have a high-value potential target customer. So even in those cases, you might be going after, like, organizations where they’re going to buy it on behalf of a large number of users.
[24:05–24:19] David Hirschfeld: That would be a target that you could use to go after. Business networks where you’ve got a buyer and a seller, they can work really well if these are high-value buyers and sellers.
[24:19–24:27] David Hirschfeld: But if it’s, again, if it’s more of a mass market buyer and seller market, like if it’s Fiverr or something like that, Launch First would not work for that.
[24:27–24:34] Zorina Dimitrova: So you would say it’s more adaptable to B2B types of businesses?
[24:34–24:36] David Hirschfeld: It’s ideal for B2B. Yes.
[24:38–24:48] Zorina Dimitrova: Okay. So while you were speaking, it got me thinking about the legal aspect of not meeting the expectations of the customer contract.
[24:48–24:58] Zorina Dimitrova: So in case the product could not be developed for whatever reason, it fails. And the final customer doesn’t get their, you know, whatever they paid for.
[24:58–25:02] Zorina Dimitrova: What are the legal implications for the startups? And are you accounting for these?
[25:03–25:17] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. So I tell people that when they start to create sales, one of the things they have to do is provide a guarantee to the customer that a first version, an MVP, will be available by a certain date.
[25:18–25:29] David Hirschfeld: You know, maybe, say, if you were expecting the product to be ready in four months, then you maybe, say, six months. And there’s a couple different ways of doing a launch.
[25:30–25:57] David Hirschfeld: One is the classic pre-launch sale like what we’re talking about, where you’re selling a product, but the first version won’t be out for several months. Another way is what’s called the concierge launch, where you’re selling them on the concept, but they can start to take advantage of the service because it’s more of a service-oriented system that has a sophisticated software that manages it.
[25:57–26:19] David Hirschfeld: And now you cobble together some workflows and resources, WordPress and Google Apps Scripts and maybe Google Spreadsheets or whatever you need, whatever the different pieces that you need to start to provide the service and you manually manage the service and start to give them the service within a few weeks of the purchase.
[26:20–27:00] David Hirschfeld: And then you can handle a certain number of customers this way while you’re building the system. And really, it’s a great way to launch. We run into a number of projects where people are doing this as a way of validating basically doing launch first as a way of validating their service and learning how to run their business from a service perspective before building the software I got several customers like that It’s a very successful way of doing it, where one is in certified providers for certain types of education,
[27:00–27:27] David Hirschfeld: where she’s gone to service organizations, you know, educational organizations that would be needing these service providers and just using paper forms and a little bit of automation and pre-selling the service to those organizations and manually managing the certified providers and providing them and now building the software for this.
[27:27–27:45] David Hirschfeld: So that’s an example. And that’s a great way to launch, a better way to launch even than just pre-launch sales. But to answer your question, you just have to be willing to commit to getting it to them by a certain time and the ability to refund them if you, for some reason, can’t.
[27:46–27:57] David Hirschfeld: Like if you realize that you, in the really rare case, you came up with some kind of software concept, you realize it’s just not possible to do it. I mean, this is super rare.
[27:57–28:04] David Hirschfeld: but you realize while you’re building it, you can’t do it. Now you have to be willing to refund all your customers that you’ve done the pre-line sales to.
[28:06–28:06] : I see.
[28:07–28:13] David Hirschfeld: That’s pretty uncommon. We haven’t had to do that yet with anybody. So it’s not likely.
[28:13–28:23] Zorina Dimitrova: Let’s talk a little bit about marketing. How do you help customers market their, what is it called again, not minimum viable product but high-fidelity prototype?
[28:24–28:41] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. Yeah. High-fidelity prototype. So it starts with our niche analysis process because one of the secrets to this whole thing is identifying who is the early adopter.
[28:41–28:52] David Hirschfeld: What’s the early adopter niche? Who is the stakeholder in that niche with the high-value problem and the high-perceived impact of that problem?
[28:52–29:07] David Hirschfeld: These are two distinct numbers that we measure. and the reason they’re distinct is you could have somebody that perceives the problem as huge and they hate it and they want to get rid of it, but the cost to them is really very low.
[29:07–29:25] David Hirschfeld: So you can’t charge them very much for this thing, even though they want to get rid of the problem. Whereas you have other users that have a really high cost to a problem that they struggle with, but they just feel that they don’t feel very impacted by it because everybody in their industry struggles with this.
[29:25–29:42] David Hirschfeld: This is a known quantity, you know, why I’m not really motivated to do anything about it unless you can now you have to sell me on why I should be motivated. So we look for both those numbers, high motivation and high cost, because then we can easily get their attention.
[29:43–29:58] David Hirschfeld: Because as soon as you talk about the problem, they go, I hate that. And they’ll lean forward and say, can you fix that for me? And the cost is high, so you can charge them a lot for it. So once you find those two things, now you know who the early adopter is.
[29:58–30:17] David Hirschfeld: And how do you find it out? You like the early adopter. It’s part of our methodology. It’s one of the things I created out of a frustration I had working with marketing companies who always say, well, give me your ideal customer profile.
[30:17–30:29] David Hirschfeld: when I would say this is a startup. They don’t know who their ideal customer profile is yet, except in rare cases. They think they have some idea, but there are many different niches they can market to, so which one should they focus on?
[30:30–30:40] David Hirschfeld: Because the tighter you can make the niche, the smaller you can make it, the more you can charge and the higher the closing ratio because you’ve got that high impact and that high cost.
[30:40–30:43] David Hirschfeld: So this is part of the methodology I created.
[30:44–30:45] : Fantastic.
[30:45–30:55] Zorina Dimitrova: so how can people get to know a little bit more about the product or maybe get a consultation with you
[30:55–31:15] David Hirschfeld: sure go to Tekyz.com and if you’re watching this video you can see Tekyz spelled above my head if you’re not it’s T-E-K-Y-Z that’s how you spell Tekyz so Tekyz.com you’ll learn about my software development company.
[31:16–31:36] David Hirschfeld: And if you want to learn about Launch First, at the top of the page, you’ll see a menu for Launch First, click that, and that takes you to the Launch First page, which then tells you all about what we’ve just been talking about in a little bit more detail with some cool animation and things on the page and a video that describes what I just talked about.
[31:37–31:50] David Hirschfeld: And there’s a bunch of people that I have presented this to over time that talk about what they think about. And these are very well-known startup coaches and accelerators.
[31:52–31:52] : Fantastic.
[31:53–32:02] Zorina Dimitrova: Thank you so much, David. Anything else you would like to share so that, you know, we get a full picture? Anything we’ve missed? Oh, yeah.
[32:02–32:13] David Hirschfeld: And I’m just starting my new podcast. It should be out next week called Scaling Smarter. So please look for me there.
[32:15–32:31] David Hirschfeld: And, you know, and, yes, the last thing I’ll say is if you’ve got an idea for a project or you are struggling with an existing developer trying to get your project out, it doesn’t cost you anything to reach out to me.
[32:31–32:43] David Hirschfeld: and we’ll do an evaluation, pull together requirements in quite a bit of detail, and generate an estimate for you, and there’s no obligation and no cost to you to do this.
[32:43–33:01] David Hirschfeld: And like I said, this is a lot of work for us, but we just feel like this is a service that everybody needs. And we figure that we’ll just make you so overwhelmed by what we’re capable of doing that you’re going to want to work with us if that’s where you are.
[33:01–33:02] David Hirschfeld: in your business.
[33:03–33:08] Zorina Dimitrova: So how can people book a call with you? Through the website? Yeah, yeah.
[33:08–33:15] David Hirschfeld: Go to the website or reach out to me. David at Tekyz.com. Tekyz, again, spelled T-E-K-Y-Z.
[33:17–33:23] Zorina Dimitrova: Fantastic. David, thank you so much. Scaling to… What was it called? Scaling Smarter.
[33:24–33:25] David Hirschfeld: Scaling Smarter.
[33:26–33:30] Zorina Dimitrova: Scaling Smarter. What are you going to be talking about on Scaling Smarter?
[33:30–33:58] David Hirschfeld: On Scaling Smarter, we’re going to be talking with startups and scale-ups and talking to them about how they’ve used AI and automation to help scale their business. And alternatively, where they’re struggling, where they’ve been stuck in their business and doing a little podcast brainstorming about how to get past it.
[33:58–34:14] Zorina Dimitrova: fantastic I’ll also put the link or at least the name of the podcast in the description to this video and audio David it was a pleasure I learned a lot it all makes a lot of sense to me thank you so much
[34:14–34:18] David Hirschfeld: thank you for having me Zarina I really enjoyed the conversation
[34:18–34:32] Zorina Dimitrova: thank you for listening to Grow and Learn we hope that you found our podcast informative, engaging and inspiring our mission is to help you keep growing and learning and we hope that our conversations and insights have provided you with practical advice and useful perspectives.
[34:32–35:04] Zorina Dimitrova: If you’re looking for personalized support and guidance to help you achieve your personal or professional growth objectives, I offer a range of services to help. As a trusted management partner and mentor, I work with businesses in the process of transformation, looking for new streams of business, as well as M&A. With an extensive professional network of experts and mentors, I can bring on board the right person or team based on the specific needs of the company I’m working with. To learn more about the services I offer and how I can help you achieve your goals,
[35:04–35:25] Zorina Dimitrova: please visit my website at growandlearn.org. You can also reach out to me via email or social media. I’d love to hear from you. And if you enjoyed this episode of Grow and Learn, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback is important to us and it helps us to continue to create content that is relevant and valuable to our listeners.
[35:26–35:31] Zorina Dimitrova: Thanks again for listening, and we look forward to sharing more insights and perspectives with you in the future.
David Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.
He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.
Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.
You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.
For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at [email protected].
How to Launch Your Software Company Pre-Development, Fund with Revenue, and Skip Investor Search was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.