Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)
> Get to know your customers before selling to them...The easiest way to go about this is to solve your own problem.<p>The headline is good advice but being your own first customer is rarely good.<p>First the bad:<p>1: if you have problem X and have the in house skills to fix it, it’s likely that your potential customers can fix it for themselves too.<p>2: you are not the same as anyone else: you can fake yourself out by believing that your potential customer thinks the same way you do.  If your prospects are quite different from you (say you’re a programmer writing a tool for doctors) you’ll work harder to understand their real <i>and</i> perceived needs.<p>But sometimes this is good advice:<p>1 - Even if you are different from your customer (say you’re writing something broadly applicable like a web site design tool for small business), “eating your own dog food” will find bugs and infelicities faster.<p>2 - if your customer has the same needs as you perhaps you already know how to meet said customer easily, such as trade groups you’re already in.<p>In general the advice in this post was pretty basic and generic but I didn’t want to let the issue above pass I commented.