As a tech founder, I could handle anything. Except this.

Sales. It used to be the worst thing for me.

It took a great deal of effort to learn how to sell.

I'm still not great, but I get by now. It's possible to learn how to be good at selling, but it requires a mental reframing

But before I tell you about that, let me give you some context.

I'm building a SaaS in public, posting progress every day today is day 21.

I'm adding lessons from my mistakes and learning from current events.

I'm live-sharing as I build holding nothing back.

If you're interested, you can binge-read all the past updates in my newsletter.

Here's how I used to see sales:

• it has no focus on the technical side. I don't want to compromise the entire product because this one customer asked for X

• doesn't scale. emails, phone calls, etc don't scale. I have 24 hours in a day and I can build something that scales to a quadrillion users instead of doing 10 calls.

• "what if I get rejected". I built this stuff what if somebody says they would not pay for something I poured my heart and soul into?

And my "work" experience is even worse.

When I was working in companies that had sales teams, it was a constant battle.

They would tell customers we could give them anything they needed in a week. Sometimes features would take a month to build!

I'm sure some of you have been in this situation. It sucks.

The biggest problem for these types of environments is artificial barriers.

The sales team is its entity, and the product team is its entity. There are some top-level metrics that they both want to move but there is no cohesion or common ground beyond that.

The sales team wants to "close" a new customer by any means necessary. They have a number that they have to hit. Being revenue or customers signed up.

The product team wants to release new features based on their roadmap. They have their internal metrics to hit.

The result is a frustrating game of hot potato where no matter who wins, they all lose.

Why am I telling you this?

Because this bad experience made me think I wasn't cut out for sales and as engineer, I didn't want to be good at sales.

In my previous (and failed) startup I took the "build something and they will come" approach. Didn't work.

Then with the terrible experiences I had in the past weighing me down, I had to learn how to talk to people. Then sell them my product.

I had some success when I started reframing my view on sales.

In the beginning, the biggest fear was still rejection. As with anything in life the more you do something the easier it gets.

After getting rejected 50 times I got used to it.

That allowed me to understand the problem. They weren't rejecting me or my hard work. They didn't see value in what I was trying to sell.

It isn't (so much) about persuasion and being aggressive or manipulative. Is about value.

After understanding that, everything became so much easier.

People will only buy your stuff once they see the value in that.

If you can't articulate the value, they won't buy

if you're not providing enough value, they won't buy

if you're asking for too much for the value you're giving, they won't buy

The more I dug into this problem the more it became clear.

It's never personal, it's never emotional. It's a value exchange. Or, in terms I can understand, input and output

With enough value given as input, you can expect some monetary output.

Hell yeah, I managed to get the I/O into a business newsletter!

The sales process has many more aspects and nuisances, but the barrier to entering the sales game was gone for me.

I'll talk about the upside of selling as a founder in a separate post.

I failed in the past because I couldn't understand this.

Hopefully, you can learn something from this and have a head start

Progress update

• I have a goal by the end of this week to have 3 customers.

• the MVP is nowhere near ready for prime time. Tons of little things are missing

• The 90% rule is happening. the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the time.

• I promised I'd share a demo, I aim to record the demo tomorrow

Celebrations

• the newsletter count is stuck at 33. Sad times. When I get to 50 I'll do a video doing 50 pushups to celebrate.

• the LinkedIn newsletter has reached a nice count of 150. Feels unreal that 150 people subscribed!

• If you're interested in more personal takes, I'm hanging out on X too.

I cannot thank you all enough for your help and support, you're all legends!