The Cart Blog

Do you have an “I’ll Buy If” strategy?

37Signals had an interesting post about phantom buyers (you know the kind; they say, “I’ll buy it if …”).  I think it’s a smart strategy to pre-plan your product roadmap carefully enough that you can respond quickly to these people with your own conditional offer: IF you’ll buy it, I will commit to adding feature X in timeframe Y.   Of course, the difference is that your offer actually binds you to something if they PayPal you the funds, whereas their “offer” doesn’t commit them to anything.  Nevertheless, I have found that this strategy is often successful, and takes me in a direction I wanted to go anyhow, sooner or later.