On Selling Software as an Engineer

I recently had a call with Josh Perk. I friend/former colleague of mine from a few past jobs. Josh ended up running the sales engineering team at this company. He also had multiple side projects throughout his time there that he was able to get to generate revenue.

During our call, I asked Josh about a few different topics- mainly about his decision to take the leap to start his own company: the YC backed Vector, a company that mines rich conversation data in order to close and keep more customers by automating knowledge transfer.

I told him that I had launched multiple side projects as well, but always had trouble getting the first users and customers. Were there any tips he could share?

Sure, he said, here are a few:

#1 Build in a space you know

This one should feel obvious, but building in a space in which you have background experience or knowledge will always put you a few steps ahead of starting from scratch in a new space.

You can leverage the existing knowledge to shortcut an understanding of table stakes that it would otherwise take a while to understand. For example, I spent a few years in the MarTech industry and understand that if I launched a product there, it would absolutely need a Salesforce integration to materially gain any traction in that industry.

Aside from industry knowledge, you can also leverage your existing network. If you know people in the space, why wouldn't you use your connections to try to garner real feedback and try customer acquisition from people you already know who might have the problem you're trying to solve?

#2 Make yourself vulnerable

So you landed a call with somebody you think might be a user or customer. You let yourself get excited by the potential, but should temper it. Many of these calls end up falling into the trap described in The Mom Test, where the feedback tangibly becomes "that's nice, honey".

Josh described to me a study he read in college. There was a person in a coffee shop asking to borrow people's phones: "Can I borrow your phone for just a minute?". Reasonably, almost everybody refused. The following day, the same person went back and asked the same number of people, but instead changed the way he asked to: "Hey, I know this is weird, but can I borrow your phone just for a minute?" Surprisingly, it had a huge impact on the number of people who lent their phones.

That lesson stuck with Josh- there's something disarming about being vulnerable about a situation. Josh told me that when he has calls for feedback, he starts his calls a similar way. He opens calls with "Hey, I know this is awkward, but at the end of this call I'm going to ask you why you would not buy this product."

This gets the other person engaged. Instead of being walked through the features of the product and nodding along, they're trying to find a way to say no- trying desperately to have a real reason to not give you their money, one that doesn't feel like a cop out.

It might be that at the end of the call you landed a customer. More likely, however, is that you uncovered a valuable piece of feedback (even if the feedback is "I just don't have the problem this product solves").

#3 Leverage your network's networks

Sure, message all your friends in the industry you're building. If you don't ask them for referrals, however, you're wasting valuable connections. That was the third piece of advice Josh gave me. Sure, reach out to people you were close with at previous jobs. Reach out to people you weren't that close with, too.

But make sure, at the end of every call, you ask for referrals. Ask for 5 people they can connect you with. If the person you connected with is in the right field, they'll likely know more people in their field or position. Even if they don't have the specific problem that your product solves, they might know somebody who does.

The goal should be to have more people to reach out to than you have time to. This means you can start organizing and deciding who to reach out to. This means you need to start forming an idea of who your product serves. This will ultimately push you to a niche that you can serve and target- a niche that you can use to find people without needing referrals (congrats, you're prospecting now!)

As gimmicky as it sounds, this works. This was new to me, I was a little uncomfortable with it, but I was ready to give it a try.

At the end of the call, I asked Josh for 5 people he could refer me to.