Instead of "if you build it, they they will come." For Altucher it's actually, "if you pretend you can build it, they will come."
This is a common theme in some of Altucher's other stories. I think it would only be lying if you acted like you had already built it. However, selling your ability to build a future product is definitely not lying.
Bruce Scott, the co-founder of Oracle says, “I remember him very distinctly telling me one time: Bruce, we can’t be successful unless we lie to customers.” And adds: “All the things that you would read in books of somebody being a leader, he wasn’t. But he was tenacious; he would never give up on anything.”
In my experience with running my business, when a customer asks for something it has to do with your business. Maybe at the time he was just processing transactions, but he was working with credit cards. So expanding his business beyond processing and into databasing makes a lot of sense.
Customers will often tell you what they want to pay for, and if you say no, you're going to fail.
