[bsvalley]

This pretty much sums up everything. I had a similar problem trying to sell my products. If you're a solo founder learn how to sell first. Finding cool marketing strategies is great, but people need to see real faces before buying your products. It is not always true, but in general that is what I've seen so far.

[dizzydes]

Could you expand on the "real faces" part as opposed to, say, a good stable of content and decent testimonials?

Do you mean full on sales calls (vs. just marketing) would be needed for a SaaS product of relative complexity? Or am I missing the point?

Thanks

[bsvalley]

Sure, by real faces I mean pitching your product to people directly. Not necessarily over the Internet but in person. This is a step that is often missed by a lot of tech people wannabe entrepreneurs (including myself). We think the Internet is a magic place where you can launch anything from your bedroom and reach millions of people if you use the right marketing strategy (ads on youtube, cold emails, viral strategy, gamification, etc). I call this the scaling phase. You can't scale nothing. If you have zero user and zero customer, what do you want to scale?

So step zero consist on acquiring your first customer/user. This is usually when having a non-tech co-founder or someone who's good at selling would make a huge difference. We always bypass this step of acquiring the first customers, it's only when you build something and ship it that you hit a wall. You will not rank in google at first, no one will ever mention your name and the only queries you'll get on your SaaS or whatever product you have will come from your own IP. That's what I'm talking about. You just launched, now what?

So you need to go out there and "manually" pitch your product to people. Introduce yourself, tell your story, prove people what you've built is what they want. You would usually fail capturing the needs at first because of a lack of interaction with your targeted users, you will build something that isn't exactly what they want. So you need to quickly adapt to that early feedback, which is why going out there and trying out your MVP or prototype very quickly is a key to success. This is what I mean by "people need to see real faces". You could pitch your product to your mom, friends, potential users, potential partners who could help you move to the next step, etc.

The best way to find out "how to found a company as a single founder" is to give it a shot. You'll basically collect all the answers to your question.

[danmaz74]

Even with a SaaS product, unless it's really really cheap, many customer will want to talk with you on the phone or in a video call. It happened to me a lot.

[mimixco]

As someone who has been selling all my life, I'm not sure it's a teachable skill. Yes, everyone can learn to improve, but some part of salesmanship has to be in your blood.

With developers routinely making over $200k in Silicon Valley now, if you're a "product person" and not a salesperson, you can probably earn more as an employee than an entrepreneur.