A number of the technology companies that I have been advising have been working towards building whatever they have to build to get a product into the marketplace.  They have lists of features and are using some sort of project management system to track their progress.  The feature lists are long and sometimes include esoteric features that the founders believe will immediately make them more newsworthy and consequently, more able to be funded.

My advice to my entrepreneur friends is simple.  The biggest thing that makes a difference in getting funding is having paying customers.  The faster that you can get a paying customer, the faster you can show to the world that you have a product or service that people want.  The difference between pre-revenue and post-revenue is huge.  Of course, post-revenue has a volume to it.  One paying customer means something; 200 paying customers means something much more.  But as the old Chinese proverb says, a journey of a thousand miles began with a single step.  Take that step early.

Take the time up front to identify the minimum that you need to do to give your potential customers value and give them a glimpse of the future.  Once you have decided what the initial feature set is, develop with all your heart and soul.  Work fast and resist the temptation to add features.  Keep a list, off to the side, of the neat features that you might want to consider in release 1.1 or 1.2. Go through the entire development cycle.  Do not forget to quality check and validate your user interface. But release that code and sell that product.  Most likely, your initial customers will not be shy about asking for additional features.  Add them to your list and keep track of how many times each item is requested and by whom.

Only when you have gotten some paying customers to utilize your system can you determine which features are most critical to your success.  That gives you the understanding to wisely choose the small set of features that will be in the next release.  The unanticipated advantage of this is that you get another chance to tell your customers and prospects about a new release with new features that were suggested by them.  You can’t get better PR than telling your customers that you are listening to them.

The best software firms out there do this…  Look at Google with Google Reader or Google Docs. They push out new features almost every other week.  Look at 37 Signals.  Backpack today is much different from when it started out and the founders had no idea of the direction it should take, but their customers did.

You can’t get customers until you have a product out there.  Release early and often.