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Sales & Customer Development

Talking to customers and selling honestly.

18 posts · Money & Business

  1. 1

    How to Use This Guide

    Welcome. If the word "sales" makes you a little uncomfortable, you are in exactly the right place. Most technical founders feel the same way.
  2. 2

    Why Founders Must Learn to Sell (And Why It Is Learnable)

    Let's start with a confession that probably feels true for you: the word "sales" makes you a little uncomfortable.
  3. 3

    Customer Development: Get Out of the Building

    Here is the most common way technical founders fail. They have an idea. They love it. They sit at their desk for six months and build it. They launch.
  4. 4

    The Mom Test: Talk to Customers Without Fooling Yourself

    You have an idea you believe in. You're nervous about selling, but everyone says, "Talk to customers first." So you do.
  5. 5

    Asking Questions Without Leading

    A sales conversation is really a conversation made of questions. The better your questions, the more truth you get back.
  6. 6

    Active Listening and Reading the Conversation

    Here is good news for a founder who hates "selling": the best sales skill is mostly listening . You do not have to be smooth or pushy.
  7. 7

    Running a Great Discovery Call, Start to Finish

    A discovery call is your first real conversation with a potential customer. "Discovery" means you are trying to discover their situation: what they do, what…
  8. 8

    Sales Discovery Frameworks: SPIN, BANT, MEDDIC and Friends

    Let's start with a worry you might have. "Frameworks" sounds like a cold, salesy word. You picture someone reading a script at you.
  9. 9

    Qualifying: Choosing Who Deserves Your Time

    Let's start with a hard truth that will save your startup. You will never have enough time. As a solo technical founder, you are the engineer, the support…
  10. 10

    The Demo: Show Value Without Overselling

    A demo (short for "demonstration") is when you show your product to a potential customer. For a technical founder, this is the part that feels safe.
  11. 11

    Handling Objections With Honesty

    Let's start by calming a fear. When a customer pushes back — "that's expensive," "I need to think about it," "we already use something else" — most founders…
  12. 12

    Hearing "No": Turning Rejection Into Learning

    If you are a founder who finds selling uncomfortable, this is probably the chapter you have been quietly dreading.
  13. 13

    Founder-Led Outreach: Getting the Conversations

    In the early days, nobody sells your product better than you. Not because you are a smooth talker. You almost certainly are not, and that is fine.
  14. 14

    From Conversation to Commitment: Advancing and Closing

    Let's start by saying the quiet part out loud. The word closing probably makes you feel a little sick.
  15. 15

    Building the Muscle: Process, Pipeline, Habit

    By now you know how to talk to customers, run a discovery call, give a demo, and handle a "no." But knowing a thing once is not the same as doing it reliably.
  16. 16

    Glossary of Terms

    Active listening Listening so closely that you can repeat back what the person meant, not just what they said.
  17. 17

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Q: I'm an introvert and selling makes me anxious. Can I actually do this? Yes, and introverts often become excellent at it.
  18. 18

    Revision Cheat Sheet

    Reread this in the five minutes before any customer call. It pulls the whole guide into one page.