They Sold a Point of View Before They Had a Product

What Everyone Says

Build the product, then go find customers. Get something in people's hands, collect feedback, iterate. You can't sell what doesn't exist, and enterprises definitely won't touch a company with no product and no logos.

It sounds like common sense. You need proof before anyone takes you seriously.

Why That's Wrong

During a real technology shift, big companies aren't shopping for finished products. They're trying to understand what the shift means before they bet on it. Christian Lund, co-founder of Templafy, noticed this when the cloud wave hit: "especially very large businesses... they were not really buying product first. They were buying people that could understand what that transition would look like."

If you wait until the product is polished, you show up after the buyer has already formed their view of the new world. The window to shape their thinking is open before the product exists, not after.

What Christian Did Instead

He and his co-founder spun Templafy out of an old on-premise document business with two engineers and no product to sell. So they sold the thinking. "What we were selling originally was based on thought leadership more than anything. It was selling a lot of thinking and not so much product in the beginning."

Then they got specific about who to talk to. Not "the market." Christian figured there were maybe 800 people in the world mature enough to have the conversation, and he targeted those named people with pointed messaging. That got him into one of the Big Four accounting firms as the first customer, before the software was real. Templafy even raised its first funding round close to twelve months before the product existed.

One honesty note you have to sit with: Christian had an unfair advantage and says so plainly. Two decades in the same on-premise business meant he "had all the access to these people." He didn't cold-start those relationships. So don't copy the outcome and skip the earned part.

The Principle Underneath

The transferable move isn't "have twenty years of relationships." It's this: in a shift, a sharp, specific point of view is a sellable asset on its own. You can open enterprise conversations by being the person who understands where the world is going, and use those conversations to co-create the product with the buyer instead of guessing at it.

It works because you're not asking them to evaluate software. You're helping them think, which is exactly what they want during uncertainty. The product you build afterward is grounded in a real account's reality, not a spec doc.

Should You Do This?

Do this if you're entering a market during a genuine shift and you have real, specific expertise in how it plays out. Pick a short list of named people who feel the shift most, and lead with a view, not a demo.

Skip it if your "point of view" is generic trend talk you read somewhere, or if there's no shift and buyers just want a working tool. Without earned depth, thought leadership is noise, and enterprises smell it fast.

The test: could you get one specific, senior person to spend an hour with you on where this is going, with no product in the room? If yes, you have something to sell before you have something to ship.