Sales

So I think that the biggest shock of my short entrepreneurial career has been sales. Sales is hard. It's easy to sit in your ivory tower and build a product, but SOMEONE actually has to sell it. Unless you build a product that no one buys, which is monetized indirectly through ads. Then you build all of the cool features that you want, and hope that people come and click on your ads. But that's a digression, and probably the subject of another post entirely.

Returning to the point, sales takes skill and real work. You build your product, and talk about the millions of users, but then you have to actually go out and get people to pay you money. So you mean they won't just magically come beating down your door and asking to give you money? Well, in some cases it may work this way, but most of the time you will have to seek them out. At least until the "viral effect" kicks in and you experience hockey puck-shaped growth (ha).

So, in our case, we knew next to nothing about sales, at least in our industry. I sold knives the summer between high school and college. My business partner did a bit of telesales in the financial industry. Walking into a restaurant and trying to get them to buy a product was a completely different situation. No worries, though, because we were willing to try. And we've done a lot of trying.

So here's another interesting concept that I didn't quite grasp from business school. Even when the customer interested in the product off the bat, it still seems to take several meetings to get them to buy. I'm starting to understand things like cost-of-sales a bit better. You really can't sell a product for $50 a month if you have to make three pre-sale visits to the customer. They definitely tell you this stuff in business school, but you don't really learn it until you actually experience it. Eventually, you start to understand how much money you need to make to support yourself, and then you can use that to figure out how much each sale should be worth. Sure, you can hire dedicated people to sell, but they add to your fixed costs. As a founder, you can pay yourself next to nothing, but your employees don't expect the same deal.

Which brings me to my next point: switching hats is hard. Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky both talk about the cost of interruptions (skip to point number 8). I have found switching hats between sales and engineering to be very costly. Not only do you have to switch hats, but you also have to switch mindsets. After spending some time selling, I have a lot of trouble switching into engineering mode.

Anyways, more on this later...