To find your first customers, do sales not marketing

blog.louisnicholls.com

13 pointslouisswiss3 comments

I see 99 ways this approach would fail, except one case, it could work if my product is able to hit product market fit. PMF is why most startups fail, not because they couldn't figure out how to sell... Even we assume Saas, FinTech, Dev tools, Uber for dogs are in the same bucket of sales variety, then applied this battleship approach, you'd be dead in the water before you realize your product isn't solving a problem you can charge money for yet most people you ask would tell you if you added certain features it could be useful, or if you tried this other segment of customers you could make it.

Plus "buy my book to learn more" didn't work for me. I'm a founder. Just saying.

OP here. Sorry, I don't quite get your point.

I'm arguing that you can find product-market fit faster by doing sales than marketing, because doing sales allows you to gather more (and more useful) information from your target audience faster than marketing does (binary yes/no responses).

I'm not the OP, but you can reduce this down to this analogy:

Sales is asking questions; Marketing is talking.

This is a bit of a tautology to be sure, but the article is correct.

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