Worst Practices Entry

Once upon a time, two friends and I decided to start a business.  We had devised some medical software that made a certain piece of medical hardware a lot more useful.  It was a good product, frankly far better than anything else out there.  The problem was that we hadn't a clue how to market it.  We knew we had to sell, though, and that's what we tried to do.  We spent a lot of our scarce resources sending one of us around the country to conventions and trade shows, selling directly to hospitals and labs that bought the hardware.  Too much effort and too much expense for too few sales, and soon we shut down.

The problem is there was a far better solution right under my nose, and it would have made us.  There were only two companies that made the hardware.  If we had licensed our software to them, they could have worried about bundling it along to their customers.  We would have had two customers that would have been doing the heavy sale lifting for us.

Having a product means selling it, but sometimes your customers aren't who you think they are.