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Someone asked me to explain the difference between sales and marketing…

Someone asked me to explain the difference between sales and marketing, as I see them, and why I think more indie hackers should focus on sales.

Marketing is about spreading your message far a

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    It's interesting that sales doesn't seem to get covered as much in Indie Hacker communities, but it's so valuable to get that quick feedback and will make your marketing & product so much better in the future

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      Sales is not that attractive to many developers and tech founders. It requires talking to people (scary) rather than writing code (fun), and it doesn't have the same reach as a massively successful marketing campaign.

      It's also a lot less visible than marketing, and therefore less familiar. All of us encounter dozens of marketing campaigns on a daily basis, but we're rarely the target of sales calls.

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    Great - I'm in the middle of a post on the same thing (also inspired by your earlier post). Over all very similar, but it's interesting to see where we diverge.

    Will post a link to the finished article later today.

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      Make sure your post includes some info about how to get started with it! haha

      Like, how do you start the conversation? Do people just do cold contacts via LinkedIn or something?

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    This was required for me. Your reply on my comment in that post had me confused. Was wondering. Now it is quite clear. 😃

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    Sales is how I built my most successful business, which was a purely offline brick and mortar business. It was very fast and easy to get started.

    On the other hand, growing it was very capital and time intensive compared to the other end of the spectrum, like my friend who built a nutrition website via SEO and domain expertise. While doubling my revenue basically always increased my costs by something like 1.9x, doubling his adsense (and later DFP) revenue probably only increased his costs by 1-2% each time. With more revenue relying on each customer, revenue was also inconsistent, which was sometimes painful given the high fixed costs. This is a major reason I eventually quit that business while he continues to run his ad-driven business on a part-time basis, earning more and more (likely into the 7 figures this year)

    I get sales and I'm not opposed to it, but it also sucks in its own unique and special way.

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      These are good points. It's also possible to build a scalable sales-focused business. To do so usually requires selling low-churn high-ARPU software. My favorite example here will always be @lynnetye's business, Key Values.

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    This sounds awesome! I would love to be having conversations with people about my app - even if not for sales, showing people and seeing what they like/dislike would be amazing!

    I'm definitely fearful of reaching out to people. It sounds scarier when trying to convince them to buy haha.

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