I had a conversation today that reminded me of a challenge that all non-technology founders face when building their business.
Which is that you suddenly have to get very good at selling.
More specifically, because you’re actually building a technology business, and all technology businesses are based on software, this means that in reality you have to suddenly get very good at selling software.
Selling software is a very specialist discipline because it’s very easy to focus on what the thing does, and start talking about what the thing does, but what the customer wants is to focus on “why the thing is”.
I don’t like to do too much sales and marketing content on my socials, as I like to focus more on the actual building of the product, but to me this is such a major issue that catches people off-guard.
Particularly if you’ve spent 20 years in industry, other people in that business would have been doing the selling of your old company’s solution. You don’t have that anymore, and that really catches people off-guard.