While startups always make a big deal about introducing new products, the real birth of a company comes not when you launch your first product but when you land your first big customer.

Here’s the difference: it only takes a demo to launch a product, it takes a business model to land a customer. Thus the scariest time in a startup’s lifecycle is the period between shipping the product and closing the first big customer deal (this is period that the VCs call “proving that the dogs will eat the dog food“).

In true ClueTrain Manifesto fashion, product launches are largely a vendor driven activity, that is to say mostly wishful thinking and hand waving about your new, improved, bright shiny thing. Getting a customer to dig deep and pony up 7 figures for your bright shiny thing puts you in a whole different league.

Launching answers the following questions:

1. Can we give a good 5 minute demo? Silicon Valley is littered with technology in search of a market.
2. Can we sound like we know who might want to buy this in the abstract?

Landing a big customer answers much more interesting questions:

1. Is my product solid enough for somebody else to bet their job on?
2. Does my product solve such a big problem for that person that they are willing to bypass much more established, safer vendors to bet on an unknown startup?
3. Is my business model credible enough that another company will bet their business on our being around 5 years from now?

WaveMaker launched our visual Ajax development tool in February. Yesterday, WaveMaker announced a 7 figure deal with KANA. KANA sells customer service software and has over 700 customers.

The most exciting element of this deal is that KANA will ship the WaveMaker Studio as a built-in customization tool for their call center platform (similar to what the Force.com platform does for SalesForce.com).

Cool technology and $2.50 will buy you a latte at Starbucks. Having a $70M company bet their future on your product puts you into the running for the Next Big Thing