You are the product until you know how to fire yourself.

This is a high-touch model for maximizing learning while delivering value. Instead of rushing to build out an automated or self-service solution, you instead speed up learning by doing a number of the steps manually or in concierge style.

e.g. If you are building a software for real estate brokers that allow them to find better comps and properties instead of spending months building out your software and making it usable for brokers, you might instead first become a consultant and sell them the results or the finished story benefit. In this case the brokers want some kind of report probably broken by neighbourhood or zip code. They could care less how this information was assembled. Becoming a consultant allows you to deliver this report to your customers by becoming the first user of your own system. But it's a much faster alternative because it allows you to incrementally build out the value generating portions first. So usability and features like account management can take a backseat to your real time pricing engine which is the core product anyway. As a consultant you might only be able to take a handful of clients which is OK in the beginning.

Remember, you only need a few good customers to test if your solution is working. And over time you work on automating parts of your software until the brokers are eventually serving themselves.

You start out with a high touch approach to maximize learning as quickly as possible. Because it is high touch you are limited by the number of customers you can service which you gradually optimize as you move from high touch to more self serve.

From a pricing perspective you can take two approaches here.

• You can either charge a premium for a high touch model and over time reduce prices as you scale out your service
• You can charge your ending price as dictated in your business model from the beginning and only use concierge as a short term learning tool. (charge consulting rates vs charge product rates)

Obviously the first one helps to inject more short term cash flow into your business, which can be really helpful, especially if you are bootstrapping. But be careful because it can also lead to the billable hours trap. If you raise your rates high enough you disincentives yourself to invest in the product which is going to be a cost center compared to the consulting side of your business. This is not necessarily a bad thing but a trap nonetheless to be wary of.

If your goal is building a scalable product you have to be disciplined towards investing in the right systems to scale your customer production rate, which means giving up your margins for volume over time. With the second model there is no way you can build a scalable business with a concierge approach. So there is a higher sense of urgency of building something scalable fast.