Only successful founders to this?

They sell their product.

In a previous post, I talked about how sales are hard as a tech founder.

In that post, I promised I'd talk about why you should do sales as founder so here I am talking about it.

When I started my first SaaS I thought I could avoid doing sales.

Boy was I wrong.

But before I tell you about this, let me give you some context:

• I'm building a SaaS in public, posting progress every day today is day 25.

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

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

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

Let me first address the elephant in the room: giving your product away for free.

Don't offer your product for free so you don't have to worry about sales.

Trust me I did that. My brilliant plan was:

Offer the product for free, get feedback, and iterate on the product based on the input. Eventually charge my users.

It was a colossal failure.

The main problem was that not charging for my product meant I didn't have any customers. Not having customers meant not having a recurring stream of revenue that could sustain my company.

That inevitably leads to failure.

I'm an engineer, I wasn't comfortable doing sales. that plan was an attempt to stay in my comfort zone while still attempting to make money.

After months of nothing moving and wasting money, I finally understood. I needed to get customers and so I started charging for my product.

By the time something was moving in the right direction I ran out of time and money.

Don't make the same mistake I made.

Here's what I learned from this experience.

Doing sales as a founder is not a chore is probably one of the most powerful weapon you have.

To sell to people you need to know what problem they have and have a solution for their problems. This is the definition of a successful business in a nutshell.

Having a solution for their problems ensures you're building the right thing.

When you're selling a solution to a problem people with that problem will buy it. If they don't you're either:

• not articulating the solution well enough for them to understand it

• not solving their problem

There is one question you're probably asking yourself right now:

Where the hell am I going to find potential customers?!

I read tons of material and none of that worked for me.

I'm going to tell you what I did and what worked for me.

I tried:

• giving my product away for free - didn't work

• run ads for my free product - didn't work

• building a lead magnet for my product - didn't work

• run ads to a paid product I built - didn't work

• start building a personal brand and send people to my product(s) - worked but is incredibly slow

• reached out to 83 people manually - worked. I got about 12 customers this way

• ask my customers for referrals - other people who might enjoy my product. Worked incredibly well, 6 new customers this way

I didn't get enough customers to pay me a salary but two things worked: reaching out to people manually and asking for referrals.

The good old advice "do things that don't scale" was the only thing that worked.

Unfortunately, I was too much of an engineer to understand what that meant.

Hopefully, this post will be eye-opening if you're in a similar situation I was in.

I want to cover one last thing to avoid:

Don't hire a sales team in the beginning.

Do sales yourself.

This will ensure you get first-hand experience on how your customers are seeing your product. Will allow you to set the right direction and solve the right problem.

Getting second-hand knowledge from your sales team will not have the same benefits for you or your company.

Over to you know:

• do you do sales yourself as a founder?

• what's the hardest thing about sales for you?

• have you made similar mistakes to mine?

Progress

Recap

• I started a SaaS 2 years ago. I failed at making it take off.

• I had a problem: I wasted tons of time and money in creating landing pages that sucked.

• To make it worse, I wasted tons of money on ads that would send traffic to terrible landing pages.

• I spent an insane amount of time learning about copywriting and buyer psychology and I created landing pages that converted

• Unfortunately, it was too late. I ran out of time and money.

• I started a consultancy gig with a friend and I wanted to do something to apply all my learnings and failures.

• I decided to live to share me build something new in public from scratch

• I'm documenting the journey and the actions I'm taking every day. Also adding learning from my experience

• I formulated a hypothesis: "People are willing to pay for a product that makes it easy to create high-converting landing pages."

• I did a few user interviews to confirm the hypothesis.

• After doing enough interviews I had enough confidence to build an MVP.

• I shared the initial MVP with a few people and I got positive results.

• I'm getting ready to onboard customers now

Latest

• After battling with subdomain and auth for a day or so I finally shipped a version of the product where I can create accounts for individual customers

• I have created a stripe link for people to pay me, not I need to look for customers

• I want to find 1 customer by the end of the week

Celebrations

More and more legends joining the ranks!

• The newsletter is steadily growing! 44 subscribers now! 7 more to go for a 50 pushups video!

• I lost 1 subscriber from the LinkedIn newsletter. Had to happen sooner or later but I'm sad about it

• I've got 198 followers on X. Help me breach the 200 mark!

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