Thanks Charles. Do you actually block that time off? Probably a good ratio to fix in my calendar

you building it? :)

Trust Paul G to have a solution. Missed that post, but like it

For sure, it's a balancing act. But I'm going to try and be disciplined about being agile

Hilarious! All my meetings are your fault :)

Apples and oranges. The fact is that venture backed businesses are artificially trying to create value in a very compressed period of time. This is what makes the success rate so low. Most of the examples that you cite don't fit that. Apple did raise venture capital btw

Pete,

One of our enterprise Saas companies had a lot of success adopting consumer SaaS principles including :
Stripped down entry version of the product making it faster, cheaper and easier for customers to start seeing the value you bring. One even went so far as to make a free version.

You need to get to the root cause of the delays. In my experience there are three sources: fear that you can't deliver the promised features. Fear that you can't fully support big customers. Fear that you will run out if money. Transparency is the answer here. Share your documented support practices. ( in fact no SaaS company can succeed without customer support being a top priority). Let customers try the features. Give them access to your top tech staff. Include customers in an advisory board on product roadmap. And don't hesitate to show who you are funded by to give customers comfort about your financial health.

Really understand your process. Look at your best (shortest) sales cycles for leanings and best practices:
What industries, budget levels, champion titles and other attributes are common amongst your shortest cycles?

Consider offering some sort of guarantee. Stand behind your product and service offerings.

There's no magic bullet but by understanding your customer, your sales process and by removing fear and obstacles you can massively compress sales cycles.

I'm not saying it can't be done solo. But VCs pattern match and have more data points than most. And that data clearly shows that co founders are on average more successful than solo founders. It's that simple

The best meetings are light on pitch and heavy on free flowing discussion. But you need the structure of the pitch out of the gate to set the stage. But just sitting listening passively to a pitch is painful and not productive. And gives the pitcher nothing! So, I like to start digging in as quickly as possible.

Love the last question the most! :)