Selling Before You Build

​Building the wrong thing is one of the most expensive mistakes early stage founders make. In this practical session, Jacqueline Kressner will show you how to validate demand and generate early sales before you invest time or money in building a product.

​Jacqueline will share proven approaches to pre selling, customer conversations, pricing tests and lightweight experiments that help founders learn what customers will actually pay for. The focus is on reducing risk, building confidence in your idea, and getting real market signals as early as possible.

​This session is ideal for founders at the idea or early build stage who want to avoid over engineering, speed up learning, and make smarter decisions based on evidence rather than assumptions.

​What to expect

• ​A 40 minute talk covering practical frameworks and real world examples

• ​How to test demand without a finished product

• ​Common mistakes founders make when validating ideas

• ​A 20 minute interactive Q&A to dig into your specific challenges

​Jacqueline Kressner is an international commercial and market expansion leader with 16+ years of experience operating as a bridger between technology, capital, and institutions across Europe and Asia. Her work sits at the intersection of engineering-led innovation and real-world adoption, translating complex propositions into credible commercial and institutional outcomes.