JA WestenbergThere’s a lie we tell creative people.
He was the archetype: MIT dropout, whiteboard-brained, caffeine-sculpted. Lived in a Hacker House with ten other founders, all splitting rent and ramen. 🧵
He had built something objectively impressive and 5 years ahead of its time: a tool that could scrape résumés / analyze behavioral patterns
I watched him pitch it to a local investor over coffee. He spoke in full paragraphs about machine learning weights, predictive accuracy, and latent talent indexes.
The investor nodded politely, then said, “So… it makes hiring easier?” He said yes, then immediately started talking about vector embeddings.
The investor passed. So did the next one. And the one after that.
A year later, a recruiter launched something similar. Same core idea, worse tech. No behavioral science. No AI. Just a flashy UI and a loud mouth. He was closing deals within weeks. Eventually raised $5 million. I checked his website last month: it’s ugly, but profitable.
There’s a lie we tell talented people: that craft wins. That mastery speaks for itself. That building something great is enough. That a good product will find its audience.
It won’t.
Not unless you walk it into the room and make the case for it. Not unless you learn to sell -your work, your value, your vision. Because someone else will. Someone with worse ideas, thinner thinking, and better timing.
Someone who doesn’t even care if the tech works as long as it sounds like it might.
And if you’re not that person = you’re a tool in their toolbox. A clever little cog they’ll rent until they don’t need you anymore.
Learning to sell is a form of moral discomfort. It forces you to confront how much of human behavior runs on narrative, not truth. On confidence, not clarity. It feels unfair, because it is. But it’s also a constraint of the terrain, like gravity or TCP/IP. You can resent it.
Or you can route around it.
Either way, you’re already playing the game.
There are only three paths:
Learn to sell.
Partner with someone who can.
Stay very quiet while you work for someone who picked (1) or (2).
Choose accordingly
Ben Curthoys@Daojoan "if you build it they will come" is the biggest lie.
@Daojoan what I have learned is that I can build the product, and I can do the sales job.
What I cannot do is sit at my desk fixing bugs all day, focusing on what is wrong with the product, and then get up and walk straight into a sales meeting and tell people it's the best thing in the world. It takes lots of time to switch mode.
@Daojoan what I have learned is that if I do both the sales and the implementation, then every sale I make creates work for myself, and I have to do all of that before I start on the next sale, which is incredibly slow.
@Daojoan I need the sales person to care about how much work they are making for the team, but not too care that much. I need the sales person to care about ways in which the product could be improved, but not too care that much.
@Daojoan it definitely can't be done all in one brain, no matter how talented or driven. My solution had been to appoint a distributor, responsible for sales and marketing and support and implementation, leaving me to focus on the product and building the IP.