What did they sell? Is it some sort of affiliate sales when one markets and sales someone else’s products?
That’s true. It’s not correct to put all efforts in the coding. But it’s not correct to focus on marketing either. The most important thing is to find out what bottlenecks the sales. Is it a problem with the product itself (a critical bug, AV false positive, lack of features etc) or it’s not marketed well enough?
They provide a service manually until the demand is proven and then they write a code to automate. Or they even charge money for code that is not written yet, as in “we’re going to build X; if you want it, pay us Y now”.
I see the advantage in building the product first (MVP) and start selling it ASAP. In this case, software author does not have any obligations or deadlines. But if money already received, you have to answer to “investors” and that’s not good at all. Having obligations is never good.
Sorry, I do not see a sale as an obligation to add more features.
The customer paid for what I have today - presumably, because it is sufficient for them. They got their needs covered.
But my needs are not their needs. My needs are to sell more software. So if to sell I need to code in yet another feature - so be it. But if my software is minimally feature-complete, I need to focus on marketing.
In fact, just today I was listening to the founder of Sumo/AppSumo, and he said that it was beneficial for them to remove features from their software. Removing features that attract marginal types of customers let them improve their marketing message to a much higher clarity - and improve sales as the result.
You were talking about
In this case, a sale obliges you to deliver the code. Otherwise it’s a scam.
Removing features, especially ones that do not fit software philosophy/strategy is a good thing. But in case of a mature product this is often difficult, because backwards compatibility has to be kept in mind. I rarely remove features, instead, just move them deeper in the UI and also moving them deeper in the user manual as well. They are not marketed any more of course. But it doesn’t hurt to keep them.
Yes, I did say that - to make a case the marketing is more important than the code.
The code is still has to be written - if the marketing is successful. If the marketing fails, no code can save the idea. Refund and forget it. Ergo - the code is not as important.