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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

You might be surprised how well you can sell things by shutting up, listening, and addressing your customer's concerns directly rather than making a lot of noise.

There seems to be a recent meme around HN lately that you have to be a "hustler" to succeed. I think that's been misinterpreted a lot. Most of the hustle is in showing up, staying alert, and then applying just the right insight that will let your target know that your interests are their interests.

As recently as last summer, I felt that I had to make a lot of noise to make my ideas heard. I got nowhere. Instead, I've found that by listening to other people's ideas and then carefully suggesting ways to improve them, I end up with far more influence over how things actually turn out.

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This is a very hard topic to compare to Kyle's experience. First of all, Kyle is already given an audience and the success is evaluated by some metrics about his psychical performance. While marketing, you have to create an audience first. Once you're visible, you can choose be silent or keep making noise. But, usually, this is not the case with startups.

I am not talking about making noise. But it's pretty obvious that you can't sell anything if you don't make people aware of it's existence.

You can't be a quiet salesman, you can use silence to sell, but that is very very different.

There are a lot of people in the entrepreneurial community who jump up and down and say "Look at me, I'm an entrepreneur, this is what it means to be an entrepreneur, ideas are worthless execution is everything," etc.

There are also a lot of people in the entrepreneurial community who don't go to startup events because they're at their customer's offices, showing them how their products can help them.

The second kind is the quiet professional.

Sorry but that is simply not true.

In order to get into that office it requires quite a lot of work and a lot of making people aware that you exist.

If you ever worked with sales you would know that there is no such thing as a quiet sales man. That doesn't mean they are noisy.

I think you've mistaken my intent.

The second kind of professional is not "quiet." He is a "quiet professional." He is at the automotive parts distributors conference selling his software, rather than at TechCrunch50 selling his image.

You are trying to force a different reality into what it means to sell.

There is nothing more quiet about selling your software at a conference than at TC50.

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