How do technical founders actually sell their product?
Technical founders excel at building products rather than driving sales, leading to wasted months with unreliable sales partners and no closed deals. Because they are comfortable making things rather than finding customers, they struggle to get people through the door on their own.
What the numbers show
Counted from the threads quoted below. How we count
- This comes up 122.9× more often in r/Entrepreneur than across the site as a whole.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Learning to sell independently through outreach and trial-and-errorDid this help you?
- 2Hiring a co-founder with sales expertiseDid this help you?
- 3Partnering with a sales professional or enterprise salespersonDid this help you?
- 4Partnering with someone who understands advertising and content creationDid this help you?
- 5Partnering with an account executive or sales person for equity or high commissionDid this help you?
- 6Running a small private beta with a tight groupDid this help you?
- 7Reaching out directly via cold emails, LinkedIn, or coffee meetingsDid this help you?
- 8Manually onboarding users and offering free data migration or heavy discountsDid this help you?
- 9Using Excel to record, analyze, and summarize sales callsDid this help you?
- 10bringing in co-foundersDid this help you?
- 11investing funds to hire sales skillsDid this help you?
- 12trying to talk about and sell the product based on personal excitementDid this help you?
- 13Asking community members on Reddit for marketing channel recommendations (TikTok Shop, Meta ads, Amazon, local retail, etc.)Did this help you?
- 14Seeking feedback on website design, branding, and conversion optimizationDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I build, I don't sell.”source ↗
“went the sales partner route first, cost me 6 months and nothing closed.”source ↗
“I am much more comfortable making things but I guess that alone does not really get customers through the door.”source ↗
“I've spent the last 2 years building a CRM for entrepreneurs and small businesses. I'm a technical developer, I really love the product, and I know it has potential, but I have zero sales skills and I have no idea where to start.”source ↗
“if someone is Building something alone It's so hard to develop the sales skill to be honest i need someone to Do this Part of The business for me.”source ↗
“There is some unclear psychological barrier between me, and selling and advertising.”source ↗
“I don't have the impulse to try to convince people, the idea scares me, I dont feel like I have the justification to take peoples money”source ↗
“Instead of being motivated to GTM, I feel an intense friction that makes it incredible hard to act and probably makes me see this wrong.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 4How do you sell a minority share in an unprofitable small business?
- 3How to track sales when sending free products to influencers
- 9How to launch a physical product with zero audience
- 2Where to sell a small software project quickly
- 4How do you explain SEO work to clients without sounding technical?
- 14How to figure out what product to sell online