My first year in sales as technical founder

Summary

My first year in sales as a technical founder [10-2025 / English / 1917 words] Looking back at the last 12 months feels surreal. I have learned so much about selling, it’s insane. As a technical founder with a background in programming and design, nothing about this has come naturally, but it’s surprisingly rewarding. It all started when I realized that the biggest thing holding me back is the lack of paying customers, and that this should therefore be my number one priority from now on. After lots of experimentation in the LinkedIn B2B space, I became so obsessed with revenue generation that I even ended up cofounding Ibex, an agency/SaaS hybrid that helps other businesses find clients. While there’s still a long road ahead for us, it’s the first time in my life that I’m seeing a realistic path to actually building a sustainable company. I’m by no means a sales expert, but I thought I’ll nevertheless share my learnings while they’re still fresh, especially since there aren’t that many guides about this topic written by non-business people. Why do I even need to do sales? When looking specifically at bootstrapped (self-funded) SaaS startups, this is a valid question. There are many profitable startups in the low-end B2B space ($10-$50/mo) that exclusively rely on marketing. These are the perfect lifestyle businesses that the indiehacking community is dreaming of. But they’re very hard to pull off, and leave a lot of money on the table. From our experience, once we made the switch to a high-touch sales process, it became much easier to build strong relationships with customers. This includes doing video calls, sending many 1:1 emails, and in some cases even building tailored versions of our product. As a result, our customers got to know us, and felt that we’re invested. And we were also able to charge much more per customer, which is especially important when starting out. If you have the ambition to grow a product-based startup (as we do), something to be aware of ...