Ask HN: How to sell your app/side project while working full-time?

As in B2B sales, where nearly all potential clients are only open Monday - Friday.

Hire someone to do it for you and automate as much of the process as possible. Mind you, you dont necessarily need an outbound sales person. You may do with an inbound marketer.

The naive answer would be to automate it: put up a Stripe or Paypal form and let them pay for your product.

However, if you're in B2B, the client would need to trust you, as in meeting you, the sales process, even training. What I would do is not automating the sales process, but the leads process: so you don't waste time in leads that are just passing by or checking out your product. With those you could arrange a meeting and then perhaps close the sale.

After you get some clients, you could hire someone to do the sales process you can't do. Or, if you have some savings, you can hire right away and ignore the previous paragraph.

Another option would be to have a sales co-founder, but that's another story.

Automate as much as possible. Payments ? Slap a stripe checkout form (unless you happen to be in a country where Stripe is still not supported) or Paypal for others.

Onboarding: Make it as easy and smooth as possible for clients to get started after signinup. Show them exactly where and how to start.

Documentation & FAQ: Create tons of it. If a client has a question, thy should be able to resolve it through your documentation for the most part. Don't let little simple questions to come to you EVERY time.

Setup a Support Ticket system and only answer via emails/support ticket for questions that cannot be resolved via your documentation. If a client is not aware of documentation, point them to it before answering the same question again and again.

Get a decent smartphone and answer the tickets/email through that. You could even do it sitting at your desk or during lunch break

If you absolutely need to schedule phone calls, schedule them during lunch break and find a relatively quiet place where you can talk. If not quiet enough, tell the client that you are travelling and they may hear background noise. As long as it is not a screeching train, clients won't mind specially if you already told them.

Hustle. Do whatever it takes to get the first few clients except illegal activity of course. You may have to cross a few lines at work (lying about lunch plans etc) but I personally think those are reasonable to do.

I've heard pretty much all the other good recommendations that others have added, but this one - "Sell to businesses outside your time zone before and after work" - is novel! This is a great idea, though I can imagine there might be some challenges, such as if support issues peak/surge, there will be a few sleepless nights...but that might happen even if dealing with clients in same time zone. Regardless, this is quite a novel idea; and i think a good one! Kudos!