Comment by aetherspawn
7 hours ago
Most who are running a successful (or) profitable startup know that sales is a day and night job in most industries, and that it’s completely unrealistic not to have separate cofounders for development and sales.
Sure, as a total fluke in a very specific industry, software might sell itself. Everywhere else, and especially in physical product and deep tech, someone has to fully own the sales side of the business including the really time intensive stuff like website, email marketing, conferences, merch, sales meetings and trade shows. Heck, even viable solo founder companies would probably sell a magnitude harder with a sales co-founder.
Anecdotally my company picked up a few big distributor contracts for software tools and deep tech products, stuff people want. The products are done, high quality, but they don’t sell themselves - we have to actively put effort into outreach for every sale. Think about that in the context of your own startup. Building the thing is not the end hurdle, it’s kind of like a dependency to selling the thing, which creates revenue.
I have an extensive sales background and also an entry level software developer that worked for years at a coworking office while getting my solo miniSaas off the ground.
I tried over and over to explain to other founders that they REALLY should think about sales early. I'd try to say "Ok imagine your product is done magically. It works great. Now what?"
And it was interesting to see them struggle to think of what they would actually do if it was done.
How do you avoid doing sales too early?
If you reach out and get customers interested, but you delivery is delayed, don't you risk burning credibility?
You’ll rarely be too early. If you’re building some people want/need, they will be happy to hear what you’re working towards and potentially give feedback.
If you have customers that are interested, and you end up burning the relationship, there are usually other customers that are interested. The real risk when founding a startup is that you end up building something nobody wants, because the need is made up. Once you have ~10 or so customers, you can be reasonably sure that there are more than 10 or so customers, because markets are almost never that small or that specialized.
(The exception is companies that are glorified consultancies, eg. you have just one customer that needs a very specific service done. But these are eliminated once you've triangulated enough to find 10 or so customers. At that point your product is general enough that it will no longer appeal to the companies that just want custom development outsourced.)
You can definitely do certain kinds of sales too early. Early sales should be website and brand creation, and talking to people about what you’re building to see if they’re interested, not necessarily closing deals. I’d say close 1 or 2 pilot deals (for pennies and/or free is good) and then pause it there, so that you have only a reasonable amount of pressure to build and steer a high quality product.
Otherwise you’ll be under such stress that you’ll become reactive and lose your Birds Eye View, and that’s a slow way to sink.
My flippant answer is ask Bill Gates about that. It seemed to work out.
But in reality, as long as you're somewhat honest in the sales process, it'll still work out better to talk to potential customers as early as possible. Maybe the dogma has changed, but doesn't YC say to talk to your early users/customers as early as possible, and if you dont have anyone like that to talk to, how are you even building this thing you have no connection to?
1 reply →
I failed at most things I found because I'm not good at selling. I have kinda accepted this.
delay building as much as possible - unless you're doing something completely innovative such as inventing the iPhone.
research markets, research TAMs (they can be too big or too small - which is fatal) - read books about selling. reach out to potential customers in your target markets that match the TAM you want.
do pilots.
only after that then you can start building.
I just run ads and it’s profitable and I’m running it alone. Before developing I did do online marketing.
I’ve coded before vibe-coding.
What are your products? Curious what ads are still working for.
I thought this was complaining the solo founder would just be sales. Sales, with some agent lackies doing dev.