I think a lot of devs don't want to sell.<p>Even if they say so - building something is fun - I get my ideas into code I decide.<p>When customers start paying it stops being fun and people start having demands/deadlines/requests/issues.<p>Once you start rolling with project that is used by others it opens can of worms that is support.<p>I have wet dreams about building "Super Trubo Combo Tool - that solves everything ^TM", next moment I recall all the support calls and emails my boss is getting I don't want any of that.<p>It is the same with people who want to "learn programming", they could get a nice job and nice salary for that so they always say to me they would like to learn, but when they just think about sitting in front of computer for 12 hours reading documentation - well they just bail out instantly or after first 10 mins when something is not working as they wanted.
A lot of this article sounds less about selling, and more about selling out. It doesn't teach you how to sell an existing idea/product that you already have, it tells you to "abandon the hope of finding the next billion dollar idea inside your head, and instead look for it out there, in the heads of other people".<p>I don't want to scour the markets trying to find an opening, and then put in years of effort only to realize that I don't care about any of it. I'd rather build a product that I care about from the beginning.
Open source exisystem is an interesting counter answer, where we dont tey to build sandcastles, big complete things, but often just try to build libraries, protocols, standards that others can expand upon & grow.<p>This post talks about failing to find the right target. But ratger than sales first, building things & getting to assess their value, getting direct peer feedback, allows an unconjoined exploration of utility/value.
The way I like to evaluate advice like this is by taking a selection of successful businesses/founders I know and applying the advice to those cases.<p>For example, I know of one company that very successfully gamed Google search to drive massive traffic to low value pages but pages that give a tiny bit of value to consumers looking to buy a house. Enough to drive ad income to live off very very comfortably.<p>You see, that business success has little to do with the novelty of the solution (does this exist already?) or deep insights into the customer needs (what do customers really want?). It’s mostly clever exploitation of specific market conditions (cheap to build websites, Google ranks your site for free, lots of people in need of housing, easy to sell ads to many different companies through an intermediary).<p>I almost feel like the article pushes this idealized view of how to build a successful company that is actually rarely the right recipe to success in practice.
Related: <a href="https://growthlab.so/" rel="nofollow">https://growthlab.so/</a><p>What I don't like about it: The price! A bit steep (IMHO) if someone doesn't have the money... although I do understand that everything in business has to be appropriately charged for...<p>What I do like about it: <i>Everything else!</i><p>Because I've had the exact same problem that the author writes about -- so I know a market exists for solutions, such as his, to this problem!<p>Plus the bonus fact that unlike Accelerators, Angel Investors or VC's -- no percentage of ownership is apparently taken in the participant's company!<p>Which is nice!<p>Anyway, great idea, and wishing the author a lot of luck with this business endeavor!
The article isn't very good but it does raise an interesting question.<p>What happens when your prospective customers say they would buy your solution if it was available, so you build it, but it turns out there is a big gap between saying they want it and actually buying it.<p>I see this happen a lot. This is why its probably better to ask for a deposit when somebody says they want your unbuilt product. You will get a much more honest answer.<p>I also took some sales coaching, it helped me a lot.
The article is more about finding a market fit for entrepreneurs than really about selling. To me, it reads more like why developers can’t do marketing well than why developers can’t sell but that wouldn’t be as good of a title that’s true.<p>I kind of feel personally offended by the title because I stated my career as a software engineer, moved to management consulting and now mostly do business development but then again I hated being a developer so maybe he has a point.