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Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

Any takeaway lessons for evaluating future FOSS startups? Like maybe place higher weight on rate of adding new users?

I've found that my bar for investing is the same no matter what kind of company it is -- how quickly can they sell me on investing? As much as us engineers hate to admit it, the most important skill for a founder is the ability to sell. Besides the obvious of having to sell to customers, they also have to sell their vision to VCs, sell their company to potential employees, sell their vision to journalists and potential customers, etc.

If I'm not convinced to invest after one meeting, I usually don't invest. On the other hand, if I'm convinced after five minutes, I'm usually asking where to send the wire by the end of the meeting.

Armory is a good example of an open source/open core company I did invest in. They had me convinced in just a few minutes. They had an answer for every one of my objections and made me feel like I'd be missing out if I didn't invest. And so far they're doing really well and it's one of my best investments to date.

What do you find is the “best way to sell”?

Have an answer to every objection. First figure out all the ways you would object and make sure you have an answer, then note down any objections you don't have an answer to during your process and make sure you have a good answer next time.

And if you're selling a product, make sure you know your competitors well because a lot of objections will be in the form of "but competitor X does this, how do you solve that problem?" and "what do you do that X doesn't do?". So you better know X really well because the person you're talking to already does and will know if you're making stuff up.

> ...how quickly can they sell me on investing? As much as us engineers hate to admit it, the most important skill for a founder is the ability to sell. Besides the obvious of having to sell to customers, they also have to sell their vision to VCs, sell their company to potential employees, sell their vision to journalists and potential customers, etc.

As cynical and hollow as it sounds, pretty sure this advice is consistent with what I have heard in multiple videos and blogs from YC.

See also: "create investor fomo", https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/search?q=create%20fomo%20in...

I wouldn't say it's cynical. At the end of the day companies don't live unless they can make money. So that, by necessity, is step 1.

It's important to not conflate getting investors with getting customers.

Ultimately you care about the latter and you don't always need the former to get there.

Honored to have you as an investor, jedberg!

And I’d modify one thing you said: I believe the #1 most important skill for a startup CEO to master is storytelling —- which is critical for selling, fundraising and recruiting. https://www.founderculture.net/c/new-noteworthy/the-1-must-m...

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