Your First Sales Aren't About Selling

I used to think my first job as a founder was to build a product. My second was to build a sales machine to sell it. I’d download sales playbooks, cram acronyms like BANT and MEDDIC into my brain, and write email scripts that felt like they were engineered in a lab.

Then I’d get on a call, my perfect script would crumble after the first question, and I’d be left stammering about features to someone who couldn't care less.

I realized something: I was doing it all wrong. We all are.

The Problem with "Sales Playbooks"

Most advice about early-stage sales reads like an instruction manual for assembling IKEA furniture, but with more acronyms. "Qualify leads," "execute the playbook," "optimize your funnel." It's no wonder our first sales calls sound like we're reading from a teleprompter.

The real issue isn't that your product is bad—it's that you’re trying to run a process you haven’t earned yet. You’re trying to optimize a machine that doesn’t exist.

As one founder told me, early selling is "art and jazz and luck and emotion." And you can't force jazz into a 7-step framework you found in a blog post.

What Actually Works: Three Things That Don't Feel Like Selling

1. You Are Salesperson Zero. Period.

Before you hire a Head of Sales, before you even write a job description, you need to accept your new title. You, the founder, are Salesperson Zero.

I don’t care if you're an introvert. I don't care if you think you "suck at sales." For the first 10-20 customers, you have to be the one on the front lines.

Why?

No one else has your conviction. An early hire sells a product. You sell the vision. People bet on the visionary first.
The feedback is pure. Every confused question, every objection, every "oh, I get it now!" is a direct signal from the market to your brain. You can't outsource that.
You can't be fired. A sales rep has a quota. They'll stick to a broken script because they need to show activity. You have the freedom to fail, to experiment, and to completely change your pitch mid-sentence. Your only quota is learning.

One of the best founders I know said his first 90 days were spent "80% selling. Talking to 3-5 potential customers every single day." He knew his real job wasn't coding; it was learning what people would actually pay for.

2. Stop Cold Calling. Start Eavesdropping.

The default founder move is to scrape a list of emails and blast out a generic pitch. It's a soul-crushing exercise in begging strangers for their attention.

There’s a better way: Go where the pain is already being expressed.

Your future customers are already complaining about the problem you solve in public forums, subreddits, and Slack groups. Your job is to find them.

I saw a founder go from zero to hero with this. His cold outreach was a ghost town. Then he started lurking in online communities. He'd find posts like:

"Ugh, has anyone found a decent tool for managing X? My current spreadsheet is a disaster."

"I'm looking for an alternative to [legacy competitor]. It's so clunky."

He didn’t drop a link and run. He’d join the conversation, offer some advice, and then—only after being helpful—would he say, "Hey, I'm actually building something for this. Happy to show you if you're interested." He wasn't a cold caller anymore; he was a welcome solution.

3. Use the "Horseless Carriage" Pitch.

Founders love to talk about how unique their product is. "We've built a revolutionary, decentralized platform using a proprietary AI algorithm!"

Stop. You’re just making people’s brains hurt.

Your prospect doesn’t want to learn a new category. They want to fit you into a box they already understand. The first cars weren't called "personal transportation modules." They were called "horseless carriages." The name did all the work. It took a concept everyone understood (carriage) and added one simple differentiator (no horse).

Bad Pitch: "We're a synergistic, asynchronous communication platform."
Good Pitch: "It's like Slack, but for construction sites, so nothing gets lost."

The key: Position yourself as an "X for Y," where X is something people already pay for. Once they get the bucket you're in, then you can explain what makes you special.

The Real Metric That Matters

Forget demos booked or emails sent. For the first 90 days, there is only one North Star:

Get to a dozen paying customers, or $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

That’s it. That’s the goal. Not verbal commitments. Not a pipeline full of "maybes." Cold, hard cash from people who find your thing so valuable they're willing to pay for it. This number is your proof that you haven’t just built a cool project, but the beginning of a real business.

What This Actually Looks Like

Here's a story from a founder I coached:

On her first few calls, she tried explaining her complex data analytics tool. She saw a lot of blank stares. On her next call, she was about to launch into the same pitch but stopped herself. She just said, "Look, it's basically Google Analytics, but for your internal company data."

The customer leaned into the camera. "Oh. Tell me more."

Result: She closed the deal that afternoon. Not because her pitch was perfect, but because it was simple. She stopped trying to sound smart and started being understood.

The Long Game

This isn’t about a 30-day hack to get rich. This is about laying the foundation. By being Salesperson Zero, you’re not just closing the first few deals; you’re writing the first draft of the playbook your future team will run.

Once you’ve personally closed 15 deals, once you have a pitch that works and you know who your customer is—then you can hire someone. But you're not hiring them to figure it out. You’re hiring them to run and scale the system you built.

Getting Started (Without the Overwhelm)

Pick 3-5 "watering holes" where your customers hang out online (subreddits, forums, etc.).
Spend a week just listening. Don't post. Don't comment. Just read and take notes on how people describe their problems.
Start answering questions. For the next week, your only goal is to be the most helpful person in the room. Don't mention your product.
Find one person you've helped and say, "By the way, I'm building a tool to solve this. Would you be open to giving me some feedback?"
Ask for the sale. If they like it, ask them to pay for it.

That's it. No "funnel optimization." No "lead scoring." Just conversations.

The Bottom Line

Early-stage sales work when they don't feel like sales. When you're genuinely trying to solve a problem for someone, they want to know what you're working on. When you're just there to run a playbook, they can tell.

The best sales process isn't a process at all. It's a conversation with someone interesting who happens to be building something useful.

And that's not something you can find in a playbook—it's just being a founder.