Buyers decide how they feel about a product in the first few minutes. Everything after that is a document review, and Steven Capuano argues it is the part founders never rehearse.
A founder walks into a category review with a sample, a deck, and a price. The buyer picks up the sample, turns it over, sets it down, and asks a question that has nothing to do with the product: can you send over your vendor packet? That moment, in Steven Capuano’s experience, is where most small product companies quietly lose the account they thought they had just won.
Capuano has spent his working life on the documentation side of product development, and his read on retail distribution is unsentimental. A buyer’s job is not to discover great products. A buyer’s job is to add revenue without adding risk to a supply chain that already has more vendors than it can manage. Great products are abundant. Companies that can produce a clean, complete, current set of documents on request are not.
