Why Technically-Brilliant Founders Suck at Sales (And the 3-Step Fix)

Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash

It’s not because you’re introverted. It’s because you’re solving the wrong problem. Here’s how to reframe sales so it actually makes sense to your brain.

Let me tell you about David.

David is one of the smartest engineers I’ve ever met.

He can architect a distributed system in his sleep, debug the most obscure edge cases, and write code that’s both elegant and performant.

He built an incredible SaaS product for DevOps teams — something that genuinely solved a painful problem.

But six months after launch, he had exactly 11 paying customers. And he was on the verge of shutting down.

The problem wasn’t his product. It was that David, like most technical founders, was terrible at sales.

And the advice he’d been given — “just get out there and sell,” “fake it till you make it,” “always be closing” — made him want to crawl into a hole.

If you’re a technical founder who feels physically uncomfortable with “sales,” this article is for you. The problem isn’t you. It’s that nobody has ever explained sales in a way that makes sense to how your brain works.