How to market & sell from your developer cave

A few days ago @drmauii wrote a comment on my post:

no time/ability to sell stuff I do :-( guess is a common problem. Where are all the IH marketing/selling guys hanging these days??

I think he is right. This is a common problem here.

When you listen to the IH podcast you often hear successful founders saying "talk to people" and "make your first sales one by one". I am ok with talking to people in general, but I find whenever I try to do this in a sales context I get blocked. It feels dishonest and "salesy" when I am pushing something, rather than just talking to them without a goal. I am very much allergic to this sensation.

So I thought of three solutions to this.

• Get over it, push down the feeling, and just sell.

• Build a match-making site where people who like sales can meet people who have products with potential. If a sales person sees a product they think they can sell, they negotiate a deal to work together for commission or flat rate towards some specific and well-defined goal like "grow from 10 MAU to 100 MAU".

• Find people who are discussing the problem online already and post replies with my product as the solution. Find them on Twitter, Reddit, GitHub, forums, search, etc.

Option 1 is out for me. We get to choose our own character and I don't want to become the type of person who can push something without feeling uneasy. Other people are ok with that and that is great, but it's not me.

Option 2. I spoke to a good friend of mine who has a lot of marketing and sales experience and they said that this match-making site probably wouldn't be attractive to people who love to sell. They want big money for making phone calls, not detailed action plans for small amounts of money. Basically they are the opposite of me and get a kick out of pushing things and succeeding at it. Making a sale is their "it compiles, ship it".

Also it would take a lot of work to build that site, and then I'd have to market and sell it to find users. So the site itself would have the problem it is trying to solve. Uh oh, infinite recursion detected! Abort!

The third idea, finding users online, I think has legs. What I like: 1) No infinite recursion sales product vortex don't cross the beams 2) instead of trying to direct a conversation ("salesy" and "pushy") you're just helping somebody with their problem 3) you can do it from the comfort of your developer cave 4) there was a person on IH podcast a while back who did exactly this to grow a business from 0 users [can't remember exactly which interview it was but it was technical and they just broke $100k per annum].

In fact @akfaew from IH has already built a product https://syften.com/ to support this workflow: finding places where potential customers are talking about the problem your product solves. I am not affiliated with @akfaew or Siften - I just think it looks cool and solves this problem nicely. I hope it gets a ton of users!

So I'm going to try this third option myself with my Excel and Word add-ins, and I will report back.

PS I also think this option is a great way to validate product ideas before building anything. Are users talking about the problem you solve out there in the world? If they are you might be onto something.