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.
Binsk 
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
Ewen Bell 📸@Daojoan
FMD this is brutally on point.
25 years I've been working for myself. Resenting the necessity to sell myself for a living. Wrestling with myself to make that effort, to keep trying. Stumping up again and again, only to deliver by halves.
Ouch.
FMD this is brutally on point.
25 years I've been working for myself. Resenting the necessity to sell myself for a living. Wrestling with myself to make that effort, to keep trying. Stumping up again and again, only to deliver by halves.
Ouch.
Britt L Free, SMM + Writer@Daojoan it's true, it's sad, and because of those things I needed to have this in my face, today.
Aunty@Daojoan I do think your choice in product / audience plays a part in how deep you need to learn how to sell.
You cant get around it entirely, obviously.
But if your target audience is technical folks, then typically they will care more about the techniques, at least more than buisness types.
My 2¢ working in a company making and selling Lab Instruments
Scott Francis@darkuncle @Daojoan I suppose that is true.
Maybe a sampling issue since I was an engineer and only got called into sales issues when technical input was needed haha
Pēteris Krišjānis@Daojoan you forgot simple fact why you might just not bother.
Because you are not in the know, in the circle, in the party of the right people.
That is the most likely factor.
If you're ready to play by these rules, please, do so, just know what is stacked against you.
Also I am pretty sure that doesn't make hiring better. I have seen hiring processes. Most of inputs are driven by managers who don't know how to hire and train people, or they are given to get short term hires.
Because you are not in the know, in the circle, in the party of the right people.
That is the most likely factor.
If you're ready to play by these rules, please, do so, just know what is stacked against you.
Also I am pretty sure that doesn't make hiring better. I have seen hiring processes. Most of inputs are driven by managers who don't know how to hire and train people, or they are given to get short term hires.
Generic Person@Daojoan Jobs/Wozniak are a salient example of this.
George Girton@Daojoan I remember a book by Frank Bettger, "How I raised myself from failure to success through selling". My main memory of the stories he told in this long-ago book is how much they involved listening. Listening to the sales prospect, and then talking about topics that appeared to be entirely unrelated to the (hoped for) sale. And, then, making a connection. Definitely not formulaic!🍸😺
Tiota Sram@Daojoan okay, but from all accounts I've ever heard, this version of "success" the alternative to which you imply is failure, leads to an excruciating and unsatisfying life full of envy, self-hatred, and despair, even while sitting in piles of cash & trying constantly to assuage your demons with more materialist consumption. For every very-wealthy person I know who actually enjoys the "fruits of their labor" (which are mainly the fruits of others' undercompensated labor), there are probably at least 5 who are addicted to hard drugs and perpetually dissatisfied.
Might I suggest option 4: get a day job, tinker with your fun ideas in your spare time, and give them away for free? Most people I know who have gone this route are fairly happy with their lives, including me, and that's a much better metric of "success" than whatever you're using. As has been said: "The only winning move is not to play."
Derrial Book@tiotasram @Daojoan
Agree wholeheartedly with 'get a job and tinker as a hobby'.
Alternatively, if you can sell yourself or partner with someone who can, if you calling slash passion takes roughly 40-50 hours a week and gets you a middle-class income, then call it a win.
Kat
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.
anilmc
notsoloud
Evan Light@Daojoan Totally. As far as earning money and winning investors, the best tech never wins on its merits alone.
Marketing and salesmanship and ass-kissing wins. Mediocre tech that just barely doesn't crash is the minimum viable tech cost of entry.