Why devs can't sell
If you prefer you can watch a video version of this post.
So, you're a developer and you want to build something that other people would love to use and - importantly - pay for.
You want to break free from your 9-5 software job, be your own boss, and maybe even get a little rich. Unfortunately the better you are as a developer, the harder it's going to be for you to become a successful entrepreneur.
Let's talk about why that is, and what you can do about it.
Think about how you approach building a product. You start with an idea, right? I see many people online on Reddit, here on Indie Hackers, on Twitter looking for an idea for a startup or asking if their idea is a good one. That's where it always seems to start, with an idea in your head.
And then what do you do? You sit down to figure out a solution. Maybe you do it in code, maybe you already know better and you make a sketch of the UI in Figma or on a piece of paper. You're asking yourself: How would that look? What kind of features would it have? What tech you're going to use? How long is the build going to take? You're up in your head, slightly to the left, figuring this thing out - like you would figure out a solution to a technical problem or a bug.
Now if you've been around the block a few times you know you need to do some market research before diving into a solution. So maybe you spend some time on Google to see if someone else built something similar. You're looking to see if your idea is novel, if you can bring something new into the world.
You've heard it many times before - having competition can be proof that your idea has value - but it's really hard to ignore that deep desire to create something new the world hasn't seen before.
The next thing you typically do is write some code. You tell yourself you're only going to do a little MVP, just to see how it looks. Just the core idea, just a draft. You think it's only going to take an hour or two but one thing leads to another and you're already days into building your beautiful sandcastle by the time you realize it's actually a little more complicated than you originally thought.
But you can't stop now. You have to get that MVP to some sort of completion before you can show it to people. And it might take a few weeks of even months before you have something you're comfortable with.
Notice how building something comes before talking to people about it. Notice how your mind jumps almost instantly from seeing a problem - to looking for a solution - to actually building one. That's the engineering mindset, a solution-oriented mindset. That highly valued approach in our careers is what causes us to build one failed product after another hoping that one day we'll actually build something people will want to use and pay for.
But hope is not a very good strategy. It's random, it's unpreditable, and the failure rate is too high. We need a better approach. And that better approach starts with spending a lot more time in the problem space before we start thinking about solutions. Because solving the right problem is way more important than building a cool solution.
Incidentally, figuring out the right problems to solve is how real entrepreneurs approach thinks.
Entrepreneurs believe that selling comes before building. In fact they believe that selling is core to their business, whereas development can easily be outsourced. They believe that the quality of the product is secondary and how well it meets the needs of the customer is where rubber meets the road. They believe cool technical solutions can sometimes be useful, but are willing to do things manually if it means getting their business off the ground.
When an entrepreneur has an idea, their first move is to talk to people about it, not to build something, and they'll avoid building anything until they see a real need in the market, ideally in the form of presales. They are happy solving a common problem that already has solutions as long as they can find an underserved niche they can target. They aren't looking to be original, but to be effective. They aren't looking for something that everyone in the world will want to use in theory. They are looking for something that a specific group of people will pay for in practice.
All of this is completely natural to someone who wants to start an online business but can't code. Since they don't have the ability to build things quickly, they naturally gravitate spend lots of time exploring problems, to make sure they have the right problem when they do turn to building a solution.
In order to be a successful developer-entrepreneur, you'll need to adopt a similar mindset. You need 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. You need to prioritize talking to potential users and customers above building things. You need to find a way to sell something without building it first, ideally without even having a prototype. You need to learn to wave your hands convincingly.
And you can do that. You can actually do it better than non-technical entrepreneurs.
All you need is to do is trust yourself to be able to build anything you come up with.
If you've been doing this for a while, you probably know this already. Whether your happy place is in mobile apps or web frontends or sophisticated backends, you know you can learn any tech stack, any framework and any programming language given a little time and effort. You can solve any algorithmic problem, any performace issue, any scalability requirement. Hell, you might even be able to center a div without looking it up first!
You can trust yourself to build anything, given time.
And now go out and find something worth building, something that will help other people and will set you free. Talk to people, ask them questions, tell them about the magic of having their menial tasks automated and messy workflows suddenly streamlined. Weave a story. Wave your hands. And when they buy it - only then - build it.
And if you don't know how to do this or already have a product you're struggling to find paying customers for, come find me on Twitter where I talk a lot about marketing and sales techniques for hard core developers.
TLDR please
Sell first, build second.
Thanks for the post. I liked it and the way you think about developer-entrepreneurs as one of them. But I can't imagine a way to sell a product before building it. Doesn't we need at least MVP?
Is there an example case that you can share with me which sells a product before launch?
You usually won't find an example like this in the wild because those first sales are done in person. But if you've done any custom development, it looks a lot like that. You aren't selling based on an MVP that you've built, but based on the problem they have and what the solution may look like. A sketch of the UI is often enough if the problem you're solving is real.
The custom development comment was a really nice way of putting that, it instantly clicked in my brain how I would personally approach this
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build. And treating this as a custom development problem is going to be a big chunk of the approach because it seems familiar to a lot of people who do freelancing or project work.
Would love your feedback!
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build.
Would love your feedback!
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
About half way through I realized you are talking about me :-/
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build.
Would love your feedback, especially since this resonated so much!
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
While I feel like I know the gist of the post, I still feel the need to print it out look at it before starting anything new.
Great stuff.
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build.
Would love your feedback! Would this be helpful for your next adventure?
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
Definitely interesting, but not sure if I'd buy a course for it.
That's cool - exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for.
Is there another format that would work better? An ebook? A full length book? An email series?
Is it even a format thing?
For me it's just figuring out what works with my personality more than techniques.
Kind of burnt myself out with social media which hasn't helped lately.
Yeah I hear you. Online advice tends to be pretty generic and based on the writer's personal experience and it usually needs to be taken with a lot of salt. My advice is no different 🤣
What kind of personality do you have? I'm curious what the difference between you and me might be like.
Hmm, I'd say I'm a pretty big introvert at heart. If I could just build and barely talk about it, I would. (Obviously that's not how reality works 😂)
I've enjoyed being more active in the community overall.
However, I tend to get obsessive about whatever I'm doing. It sounds like a great thing, but it often leads to frustration. Not as productive as it sounds.
Hey man! I'm looking for feedback on Make A Card, a tool to quickly generate virtual event invitations: https://www.makeacard.info/
At a glance: it looks cool, I made a test invitation to check it out.
Good luck!
Thanks for the actionable tips man! Will keep them in mind!
I'm in the process of drilling this idea into my head.
I'm also a huge fan of building applications I want myself.
If you can solve a problem you have yourself - you've probably solved it for someone else.
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build. One of the things I intend to cover is how to shift from building something you want or need to finding more people who have the same need and are willing to pay for it.
Would love your feedback!
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
You're absolutely right, of you build it for yourself, there are other people out there whod want it. But finding them without millions in ad spend or years in audience building is a completely different matter.
So true, this is also why it's important to be and think like your audience.
Then you know where to go.
True, although then it often limits you to sell to developers or indie hackers like you, which is the default for most people and therefore a crowded space. It only takes 6-10 in depth conversations in a totally different niche and it's sometimes a worthwhile thing to do.
You're so right. I'm noticing this too.
Breaking away from the 'safe niche' or 'native niche' is important, especially for developers.
Coincidentally the more experience you have as a dev the more difficult it is to build an MVP.
As we me mature as devs we slowly move from getting energy from the result of the programming session to the programming session itself.
Which is basically not what you want for your MVP, you want to get it done quick, but that becomes a struggle if you only get energy from thinking about the most optimal and flexible solution.
I'm the complete opposite. When I was a younger dev, I got energy from building out systems, designing architecture, and learning new programming languages and frameworks. Basically, coding for the sake of coding.
Nowadays, I just want results. I don't have an issue designing and building something quick. I get more frustrated when I realize I have to build out more than I wanted to. I try to be as efficient as I can so that I don't waste time coding for the sake of coding.
Good to hear! I regularly catch myself optimising for the best / most flexible code paths where it's just not needed.
Maybe in a couple years I'll learn ;)
Same.
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build.
Would love your feedback!
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
Interesting. I've had the opposite experience - the more years I spent as a developer the more I was looking for ways to get to the result inwas looking for faster. But that trajectory only started about 10 years into my career. You're probably right about the first decade, I definitely enjoyed the process more and more then.
I've been doing this for 20 years now 😅 so maybe I'm just a bit slow, who knows maybe in 10 years :D
Totally. I remember on my first product, wasting months on writing codes, SOPs, scaling for that zoombie traffic, and no plan on selling. Result 0 paid customers.
For the second one, got a no-code builder for the landing page, and $1,100+ within a month.
Devs can sell to devs though...
There are many real life examples of success without being the first one in a sector. Most of the failures are dreamers who want to invent something new.
Totally. Inventing a new solution to an existing problem people are aware of is a usually a good idea. Inventing a new kind of problem that people don't know they have is usually not (or at least a very hard thing to pull off).
Enjoyed the post and as a developer/soul founder I agree.
I just spent several months building something (for an industry I don't know a lot about)... now I'm trying to get sales and people on free trials/demos are asking for the similar features I hadn't considered, before they would consider signing up on the paid version.
Meanwhile I've got quite a few features that took time to build which likely will not be used... but I added it because I saw some competitors products offered it (not because a user asked me for it).
In my case I think the problem is I enjoy coding/building stuff, but I'm somewhat shy and don't particularly like that initial contact/sales proccess.... so I kept delaying actually talking to potential customers and was just doing the part I enjoyed instead.
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build and I'm going to devote some serious time to the shyness / introversion / embarassment aspect of the whole thing.
Would love your feedback!
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
Yeah, this sounds super familiar. I think a lot of us get into coding because we feel more comfortable solving problems than talking to people - I certainly did. I started coding when I was 11 years old in part because I wasn't comfortable with my peers - I was an immigrant, had trouble with the language and the whole western social dynamic was weird to me.
It's a little easier these days because most of the initial contact is in writing online. I'm still really uncomfortable doing cold calls, but writing is doable - especially since you can apply your analytical skills to review a conversation and figure out what you can do better next time.
I think this is part of the "who" before "what" principle because you have to know who you want to serve in order to talk to them. For me, it's kind of been a mix of both "who" and "what" with feedback into each other. It took me not too long to build my tool, and I have what I think is a good hypothesis for my market segment, so now I get to test my hypothesis via cold outreach.
That sounds like a really good approach. And don't be discouraged if the first hypothesis doesn't work out. There are usually many ways to reframe and reposition a product for different niches. I actually teach a strucutred method to do this until you find PMF at growthlab.so.
No way. I used to run a podcast on cohort-based courses. It was called cohort captain. I love the format of CBCs >>> over moocs
Thanks for this, it's something a lot of us need to be reminded of as much as possible.
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build.
Would love your feedback!
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
Very well put @finereli! This explanation really underlines the how of our struggling as developers going entrepreneur.
I've noticed how my mind slowly went into different phases to "peel myself loose" of the coding first mindset:
oh man, your journey is just like me, I wish I know it earlier
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build.
Would love your feedback!
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
You've gone through some serious evolution there! I wish there was a way to do it quicker, but every step takes time. And the longer you've been a dev the longer it takes.
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build.
You're further down the path than most, and I would love your feedback! What else should I include to make the journey shorter and easier for those following our footsteps?
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
Valid points. One thing I don't hear so often is that context switching is hard. Switching between doing frontend, backend, platform, market analysis, customer feedback and then also doing sales with all that it entails. Doing all this alone is herculean task.
I just launched git18n.com (see how I just wormed that in) and I don't really find sales that difficult per se, mostly just exhausting to start with something completely new after having spend months on a CLI tool, backend, frontend and platform.
I hear you! It's way worse than context switching, it's a whole mindset switching, and it's really hard to do quickly. I think that's why the one week coding / one week marketing idea is so common. But until you find product market fit any further coding (except critical bug fixes is probably redundant anyway).
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Hey Eli 👋 Thanks for this post. It's tough for us developers to change mindset which is absolutely needed in order to become a successful entrepreneur. We still continue to think like engineers and waste a lot of time on things that's only relevant in the engineering world, not in the world of business 🤷♀️ Thanks to you and others who raise attention to this topic.
I though devs couldn’t sell cause thats not what they learnt to do? Just like how I can’t code.
There is a good book about it named The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. It tells you what questions to ask and who to ask (not your mom!) before you start your startup.
Coding might be considered as strength initially but that's not the case we have to develop the products as well Microsoft dynamics 365 implementation services
.... That's EXACTLY what I just realized these last 3 days.
I thought that being able to "code" would allow me to quickly build a product when I would get an idea.
I thought that was a strength, but it's actually not. That coding skill is your enemy;)
I recently made a simple challenge on Twitter: "Pre-sale and then build", it's still on-going, let's see how that goes...
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build.
Would love your feedback! Beyond your recent realization, do you feel like you need to understand and experience the actual process for doing this?
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
There'd be value in someone creating a bot that automically links to this post whenever someone starts talking about a solution in search of a problem
That would be cool! And to prove its point, the bot would also be a solution looking for a problem :).
This was a fantastic read, thank you!
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build.
Would love your feedback!
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
Being a dev you can certainly brag on what you are developing. I follow savio (https://twitter.com/saviomartin7) and he just do an amazing job with both.
Most of the WBE Space members are Devs that want to become Indie Makers and the biggest challenge for them is to do marketing...
Since developers are not used to selling their products, when they have no users they assume it's because they have still not built the right feature.
So they end up building tons of features that no one wants instead of going out there looking for clients!
Well the great thing about devs is that once your engineering prowess breaks down marketing into a process just like coding and building, it becomes a lot less daunting. Our marketing Experts (they usually are the first marketing hires for o->1 startups that have gone to IPO) love helping technical founders create a marketing and sales plan that work for tech founder-led sales. No fluff. Check us out at www.arisedaily.io
Hey man! I'm looking for feedback on Make A Card, a tool to quickly generate virtual event invitations: https://www.makeacard.info/
Ping me on Twitter, let's chat.
This is so true @finereli It's something I need to practice. But thanks for formulating it explicitly!
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build.
Would love your feedback!
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
In our case, my founders (developers) made a thing for internal use and shared it with their clients (while they were a boutique developer agency). Turned out everybody wanted to keep using the thing.
They then built it, and got a great pre-seed investment (about a year ago). The core features were built and they all function. Over the past year, new features have been added and the existing ones optimized.
We are now listening to users on what they would want to see next. Looking good for now :)
That's what everyone hopes will happen to them, but unfortunately is kinda rare. Super glad this happened to your founders!
Thank you for sharing this! I love how you slap me "virtually" to sell it before I build!
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build.
Would love your feedback!
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
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There were so many sentences in the first part of the post that were eerily relatable... Nice way to finish it up on a high note! Thanks.
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build.
Would love your feedback!
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
I hope that over time that won't be as relatable 🤣
I hope so too! I guess the first step is admitting you have a problem, right?
Yep. And the second step is getting pro help ( hint, hint ;)
I find if a dev doesn't know he is selling, he is the best salesman. As long they don't get to technical.
That might be true in an established company with a product that has good product market fit. Seems to be rare for bootstrapping developers, but it might just be my experience.
Thanks for this, it's something a lot of us need to be reminded of as much as possible.
This got a lot of traction and I decided to do a course on how to sell before you build.
Would love your feedback!
https://elifiner.gumroad.com/l/sell-before-you-build
With a sticker glued to the inside of our eyelids, although I think even that won't help ...
True, it's impossible to sell something you're not enthusiastic about! Takes time to learn how to balance enthusiasm and curiosity, so the sales process becomes genuine.
Absolutely! I'd add that selling something you're too enthusiastic about is hard too becase any "No" can feel like a rejection of who you are and what you stand for.
If only us devs could fall in love with validated potential instead of the idea :)
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