Ask HN: How to learn to sell?

To be frank you've already committed the classic blunder of developer initiated startups. You built before you sold. Now there's no telling if what you built is what anyone wants.

IMHO, and extrapolating a lot here it's very unlikely you will get any sale based off your MVP. It's unlikely that you've hit the right market fit without first having found customer #1.

So I'd back up a step and find someone with the problem you're trying to solve. Offer the deal of a custom built solution to meet their need. Once that's built and validated that it actually solves the problem then start selling to others.

It's not a blunder 100% of the time. Sometimes non tech people need to see it working before they understand.

^ This. Exactly this.

By committing to building BEFORE you know what to build, you may have invested a lot of time to just get "NO". Stop what you're doing right now and go and talk to 20 people who might be customers and DO NOT PITCH them. Find out their problems and explore from there.

Assuming the founder knows the problem non tech people have, which in practice doesn't happen except in very very very rare cases.

> DO NOT PITCH them.

+1. Try to pitch me and I will use every skill i know to get away. DO NOT PITCH before you are 100% sure you know me.

It's not entirely a blunder but OP should consider the MVP as almost a straw man. Don't be precious about how you've designed it and don't be shocked when customers say this is not at all what they need. Having a prototype could still be invaluable for eliciting feedback.

You're saying "may have" but then advising them to throw it away and guarantee it was a waste of time? At least they can test it out. Learning from mistakes requires feedback.

Rather than avoiding pitching at all costs, perhaps they could find more sympathetic advisers to evaluate their product then iterate from there. Like relatives or friendly small investors who know the business.

This.

Also, the market segment ("small physical businesses") seems too large for an MVP.

It's an "if you have to ask..." situation. The people who understand the problem likely come from the business world they're trying to sell to and their question would be more specific, or they wouldn't need to ask in the first place.

> advising them to throw it away and guarantee it was a waste of time?

I didn't say "throw it away" or make any guarantees, let alone claim it "was a waste of time." I didn't even use those words so I suspect you're responding to someone else.

Regardless, he needs to stop and figure out if he's pointing in the right direction. At the moment, he could be 1% correct or 99% correct but he doesn't know and THAT is his sole job atm.

Perhaps. As long as they didn't put $1m and 8000 hours into it.

You do have to have a tangible demo to demonstrate value rather than wax the virtues and amazing features of imaginary vaporware.

This

In fact, I'd open with a pitch along those lines. "I'm looking for feedback on a work in progress... gathering requirements, tweaking the workflow, that sort of thing. It's not something that you'd find useful right now, but if I could get some input based on your specific business needs/business model, I think we'd both find it valuable."

Without some kind of MP to show, whether it's V or not, all you're offering is hot air and wasted time. If they speak to you at all, the decisionmaker will want to know what makes you think you're qualified to develop the product. If you don't have an awesome answer for that, you're done.

Much better to have something that serves as a conversation piece, even if it's just a mockup.

Any b2b solution you need to demonstrate to a user for them to understand it is going to be very tough and expensive to sell.

If a user is not actively looking for your solution because they don't know they have a problem, you're going to have to educate them which is quite expensive and not quite the right fit for a solo founder.

There is a lot of truth to this. Find "design partners" early in the process and build the MVP for them. After several iterations of making requests and providing feedback that you action on, they're a lot more willing to buy, especially if you give them a sweetheart discount.

Unless it's some sort of bauble or obviously useful tool to them, I think it'll be difficult to sell MVP without any of their input.

I wouldn't build a solution for the first interested prospect. Since he has an MVP but product market fit is unknown I would try to set up say 25 appointments using a consultative sales approach. If you can do that many 20min calls, face to face appointments or whatever and put yourself in the mindset of genuinely evaluating whether your product helps the prospect or not, at the end you'll know if this MVP is the right thing to sell or needs to be changed.

You need a lot of calls like maybe even more than 25 if the market is segmented, cause you might be right for one segment but not others.

1. It could be a huge mistake I built a whole startup around my business idea. The reality is that the code was simple, it took me ~2 week of not too involved coding. So, if it doesn't pan out, it's not like I wasted a ton of time or money.

2. It could very well be the case that no one needs my solution to a problem that I have (perhaps) imagined. However, if the problem does exist, I thought it would be better to be able to show the prototype as to how it would solve their problem.

Yep, exactly my thoughts!