Technical Founders Can't Sell What They Built

“I asked this question to multiple entrepreneurs and the most repetitive answer and most likely the best one: if you explain your idea to people and they show big interests and they are ready to pay even before the product is launched, so you are in right way”

“Yes, he got a better offer from the marketing department... Jokes aside: Something new is always more interesting for the typical developer (greenfield syndrome).”

“Building it is the easy part...otherwise I would work in marketing anyways!”

“The hardest part, I think, is closing the feedback loop between a channel and the product. Founders often try Reddit, SEO, cold email and paid ads all at once, then learn only that marketing is exhausting. Pick one buyer, one painful moment and one channel for four weeks. Track replies, qualified conversations, activation and payment, not impressions alone. Building gives you a visible object at the end of the day. Distribution gives you seventeen ambiguous clues and a spreadsheet. That ambiguit”

“Your original question was about introductions and talking to people. My point is it's easier to get those conversations and intros if you can be seen as an expert and have a stamp of approval. You're now talking about failure. These are different topics. Partly everything you've mentioned can contribute to failure but also most startups, most new businesses of any sort - Fail. Sad but true. Even with AI reducing cost hugely on building most startups still fail. So worth thinking abo”

“Because they know they will fail”

“That’s the value in your mind. Marketplace presents the cold start problem. You have to have users using it and you have to have businesses listing there. One can’t live without the other. That’s extremely difficult. Every business will tell you I want more customers. Of course, that’s how they make money. But why as a user would I use a marketplace? I will go on Google, see who is the closest and most convenient and rent from there. Price be damned, I am here to have fun, not to save money. Aga”

“We're two geeks with no business background and no mentor. For the last few months we've been building booking and management software for ski, snowboard and bike rental shops, plus a marketplace where customers find a shop on a map, pick gear in their size and pay before they arrive. The product is built. Getting shops on board is where we're stuck. We started with cold email. We sent about 300 emails and got very few replies. One shop did a demo and is now working with us as a part”

“He has probably a better project then or hide relevant information and want to walk out”

“I think the trust part is probably huge here, especially with cybersecurity. If I’m handing someone access to sensitive systems, a cold email from a company I’ve never heard of would be a pretty hard sell. I’d be curious whether offering a small, clearly defined first engagement would work better than trying to sell the full service upfront. Has anyone here tried that approach?”

“I agree. Especially if you are a one-person team, you don't have a second set of eyes on anything you make. My biggest advice would be: don't overthink it, trust your gut, and just do it. Experimentation will give you direction, and you will also start to understand your audience better. Even if something doesn't work, at least you get to learn and improve. Every experiment will take you closer to where you wanna be. As a former engineer with zero marketing experience, marketing my o”

“You have just finished a product you believe in. You have not made any sales after launch, and you want to know if it's because of bad marketing or a bad product. Here's my favourite way to test that: Find another SaaS startup who sells to the same audience as you, solves the same "macro" problem, but does it in a different part of the user's journey. For example, if the macro problem is "getting more money for your consultancy". You have one tool that redesigns w”

“- Long-term sustainability - Selling prospects are harder - Growth is not the same in upcoming years - Niche markets are harder to crack over time (sometimes its back to square one) Selling a business has a lot to do than just for-profit”

“You're totally right. If I client had already recorded demos and not used them I'd jump right on it! Perfect is the enemy of good....”

“This hit close. I've got four products shipped over the past couple years and the marketing paralysis is real for every single one, even the ones i'm proud of. what got me unstuck wasn't a framework, it was lowering the bar on what counts as "done": a screenshot with one sentence beats a polished demo video that never leaves the folder. the video you never publish helps nobody, the ugly screenshot at least gets seen. Also noticed the fear isn't really about the product,”

“I feel this. It’s different when it’s so personal. I get really timid around posting and I am kind of in the same situation with a video series just sitting in my drive untouched because I was overthinking it too much. I ended up starting a blog that felt like the easiest way for me to break the barrier and fear and am hoping that momentum will help me push better on other platforms.”

“Me: First sales and marketing leader in current startup. Reporting structure: two levels below CEO. CEO and co-founder: Brochures sell products, nothing else needed, therefore budget denied. Me: Facepalm”

Thanks this is great. Sometimes it feels like there’s a secret to it but good to hear it straight from someone with experience.

“Lol glad my questions hopefully helped you out. I really like that thought process on creating marketing assets - working from the bottom up. I'm trying to get the nerve/time to put together some video content and this is something I'll definitely have in mind when coming up with what to record. My product is more in the B2C space but it's expandable into B2B (really government) once I get some traction/results. Thanks for taking the time to write out all that, it's great and I&#”

“The pattern you hit (enthusiastic agreement, then silence at the pilot ask) is the single most common failure mode for technical founders selling into anything enterprise-adjacent, so don't read it as your product being weak. It almost always means you asked for commitment before you removed their risk. A few things I'd actually change: 1) Stop asking "want to do a pilot" and start asking "can I set this up on a spare machine you already have, at no cost, for two weeks, an”

“What changed for me was treating it like testing not identity. Early stuff gets almost no attention so the risk is mostly in your head.”

“mostly due to not seeing a runway most the times a cofounder is prune to selling their co just cuz they cant go from 1mil to 10mil and 10mil to 100mil for example”

“Have you done a Marketing Plan? It's the bit that usually gets skipped over, but it should be the first thing you do before you make your first product. If you can't sell it, you shouldn't make it. Your marketing should be targeted at your ideal market, using channels that reach them, and messages that appeal to them. Don't use influencers unless you know they can achieve that for you. Never use an influencer without a contract and SLA. You MUST know you market before you do anyt”

“One thing that helped me: end every discovery call by asking "who else on your team feels this pain?" The first five calls are easy, they are the ones who reply to cold outreach. The next five only come from referrals. That is how you find out whether the problem is actually widespread or you just found the five friendliest people.”

Highly recommended book!

One thing I'd add that I haven't seen here yet: on call one, don't mention your product at all. If they don't know you have a demo, they talk about their actual…

“Ask for the commitment before the demo, not after it. On a second call the demo mostly makes people polite, and polite people say "interesting, send it over". What tells you something is real is a small ask made while you're still only talking about the problem: a paid two week discovery, a signed letter of intent, or 45 minutes with the two people who run outbound day to day so you can watch how they do it today. If someone will spend money or real time before seeing anything, the”

I'm on this path mate. Gosh, it's another level

“I always wondered this. Now I work SaaS sales and it’s a big part of what we do. Really it depends on how big of a problem you solve and as a startup, if you can solve a major problem, you can lock them in. “Hey guys, Our tool will solve X problem saving you Y according the calculations. It’s still in final prototype testing, but I want to lock you in. Our retail is $ 35,000 / year but if I can lock you in now for the release you will get white glove service and a 25% discount on the first year.”

“The sequence you sketched is basically right. The mistake is jumping to "let me show you the demo" on call one. Call one is only for them ranting. Ask what they tried, what broke last quarter, what they pay for today that still sucks. Do not pitch. Take notes like a journalist. If they cannot name a painful, recurring process with a dollar or hour cost attached, they are not a pilot candidate yet. Call two is where the prototype earns its keep. Walk the exact workflow they described, n”

“I read the book “the mom test.” Totally changed the way I approached pre-sales by starting with proper customer discovery interviews. Another important book was “to sell is human” by Daniel Pink. It’s more theory but helped me get over my fear of sales.”

“It’s always the scaling issues, you got to have the vision and mission to take a product from 1 stage to another many people build products run them until the product needs to be scaled sometimes it involves migration and all the that bs so they just sell it and get going. Fair enough.”

“I always look at the last line. If its a follow up question, its an AI post.”

the "I will not promote" in the title is doing a lot of heavy lifting lol

“Hot take from working with founders, especially technical ones: A lot of people fear marketing way more than they need to. I get why. It feels public. It feels permanent. Wrong campaign, weird branding, flat posts. Feels like you're damaging something important. But early on, nobody knows you. Nobody cares that much. Most experiments just disappear. When people do start caring, that usually means something worked. The useful skill is noticing what. What seems to unlock it is a boring loop fi”

“Thats the business model for some people. They create the business model and when its proven and has value they sell it. Happens all the time.”

“I know someone selling their business now. They spent the last eight years building it and it’s profitable but they are tired! It takes a lot to build the connections, generate clients, and create a sound business model. They did the first phase but have sacrificed personal time and now they want to spend time with their family before their kids are grown. For a buyer, I’d want to see stability over the past several years with a steady cash flow. Many reasons why someone is wanting to sell. Make”

“Neither is enough on its own. If you have no marketing skills, stop treating that as a reason to hide in product: pick one narrow customer group and do founder-led sales until you can repeat their pain in their words. Ship only the fixes that unblock a repeated objection, then let those conversations shape distribution.”

“cold outreach dies when you’re a stranger with a generic offer. first clients usually come from warm paths. either people who already trust your work, communities where you’ve been useful for weeks, or another close peer. choose one niche channel and be useful there before you pitch. 50 custom messages beat 500 spray emails. if you want intros to builders who’ve been through that grind, i'll be happy to connect you”

“Yeah, that is the tricky part. From the outside it is really hard to know whether you are looking at a genuine opportunity or just someone trying to unload a problem. A lot of the important context probably never makes it into the listing.”

“For genuine sellers and buyers, The reason is that 1 group only have skill set(and resources) to launch a business to make it profitable, but lack of skills and experience to scale it to bigger levels, so they exit. And other group have skill set (and resources) to scale readymade profitable business to bigger levels, so they buy.”

Some people like building and not maintaining.

“I've noticed a lot of interesting startups have the same problem: the problem is there, and your product is there, but the visibility isn't. And obviously, it makes sense. When we're building something, there are about a hundred things competing for our attention. But I think in this day and age, visibility can really make or break stuff. I'm new here, and I figured I could start with a problem we've all probably faced at some point. What do you guys think? submitted by”

“I've sold 2 profitable ecommerce businesses and both times it was because I didn't have any long term passion for the brand I was building. As a marketer, I can reverse engineer the market and figure out how to speak to them, but I cannot relate to them at all. I used to just sell whatever worked because money was the sole goal but now I've realised with each business I built that product-founder fit is an important aspect to do your best work.”

“I think the first-client problem is often less about finding the right channel and more about reducing the risk for the first buyer. If you're selling pentesting or AI services as a new company, "we're good at this" isn't enough. A potential client is also asking: why should I trust a new company with something this important? I'd narrow the offer to one specific type of client and one painful problem, then use a small number of highly targeted conversations instead of”

“That “1 or 2 relationships away” point is huge. Early on, trust is often the distribution channel. Cold outreach asks strangers to trust you; referrals borrow trust that already exists.”

“Yeah, I agree with the warm network part. Cold outreach feels like a tough way to start when people have no reason to trust you yet, so I’d probably focus more on meeting people and having genuine conversations first, then see where those connections go.”

“For services the first clients almost never come from cold outreach, they come from people who already have some reason to trust you. Ex-colleagues, founders you know, communities you've been useful in. The channel that looks unscalable is usually the one that works at the start. Pentesting is doubly hard that way because the buyer is handing you their crown jewels, so nobody takes that bet on a stranger. The workaround is shrinking the first bet: a fixed-scope, fixed-price audit of one smal”

““I found a problem and here’s how I’d fix it” can still create a job for the founder: check whether the diagnosis is right, judge the proposed fix, and imagine where you might fit. A small working example removes some of that work, but timing still matters. If there’s no sign they need iOS help now, even a strong teardown may be a good answer to a question they aren’t asking. I’d skip the biography-style personalization entirely. “I saw your award and read your article” now looks more automated”

“Most founders underestimate the power of a community growing slowly, but growing.. I've seen this play out way too many times. Also, the fact that founders expect that after a 1 hour call, a whole week of work will be delivered to them is crazy to me”

“Marketing/Selling is generally the most part of the business/entrepreneurship. "Somehow" you can build but selling? That's real challenge. As 20 years experience engineer, I understand that after a few time I failed. Now, before build, I try to sell.”

“Isn't this like Startup 101? Do as much market research as you can, create a decent Minimum Viable Product, get it out but be fully prepared to change it if the customers aren't interested in that variant of the product.”

“That's not actually true. The problem is that marketing costs money and there's no way around it. Most start-ups spend a large fraction of their cash burn on marketing. So the barrier to writing the app is gone. But the barrier to selling it is higher than ever. With tons of solo devs competing for the same eyeballs driving ad prices parabolic. I have done Meta and Google ad campaigns. They are so automated with AI tools that anyone sentient can get good results. If they pour enough mone”

“Honestly this is the pattern I keep seeing. People polish the message for months while the actual signal only comes from putting something in front of customers every week and watching what lands.”

“Hii! Three (brief) examples from my own life: My mentor - could do sales very well, learned a software enough till he could hire out - grew the business, did so well, he taught others how to do it. Me - good at tech, learned the software, knew I was weak at sales, practiced (got a job where I'd have to do sales), grew the business, doing well. My father-in-law - decided to become an artist & created an ecommerce store, quit his job before any income came in, said he "didn't do s”

Attention is the new MOAT 😁

“Tbh in this AI age building is easier than ever. Distribution is the new MOAT. The best thing is to focus and learn it, try and fail until you succeed.”

“I'm on the technical side, but: the build isn't the hard part anymore. I can put up what you're picturing in a weekend and it still it is useless if nobody wants it. What actually stops people is not knowing who they're selling to, and being technical doesn't help with that at all. Better to know how to get users and who are your clients than the tech side.”

“I've worked with businesses for years on this stuff, and I can tell you the same thing keeps happening. People don't fail because the product is trash. They fail because they keep building instead of selling. They ship. They fix bugs. They post updates. Other builders clap. Still no money. Claps are not customers. If nobody will pay for the rough version, a nicer version won't fix it. What I see work: - Find people already mad about the problem - Talk normal - Sell the result, not th”