My solopreneur story

Ask that guy. I would guess it is none of the three, i.e. he did not deduct a salary for him, but I really do not know.

> Not to be offensive, but you sound like the guy who I don’t want to be.

Interesting comments and perspective.

A few decades ago I was faced with the challenge of selling a product I designed. I sold the way engineers do, which is to say I sucked at it. That launched me into an effort to learn. And, with friends and mentors, I did. I sold millions of dollars in products in the years that followed.

Selling is art and science. If you think of it as an engineer, you are not going to succeed. If you think it is "dirty" or "manipulative", stop trying to be an entrepreneur and go find a job. You will fail.

To be clear, there is such a thing as vomit-inducing sales and marketing schemes. Thankfully, that's the exception rather than the rule. Why? Because nobody wants to be sold this way.

Here's what is important to understand in selling: You cannot force anyone to buy anything.

Say you have a hotel. You can have beautiful gardens. Incredible rooms. Superior service. Great offers, activities and pricing.

And yet, you cannot force someone to take a vacation (or where to go). You just cannot.

What can you do then?

Well, start from the perspective that nobody knows you exist. Which means that you are three standard deviations away from anyone --when they are ready to make the decision-- choosing to book a room at your hotel. You do not exist.

Realizing this, if you believe in your product, you should want to make people far and wide aware of it. You want them to know you exist. You want them to know about your hotel when they are ready to take a vacation.

If the people you want as customers life within a small radius from your hotel, you might be able to afford sending everyone a beautiful brochure once a year and maybe even inviting them to a brunch event every so often. That's great.

Anything much beyond that requires a different approach. Still, if your audience is small and well defined it might be easier.

Once you start getting much beyond that, it can become exponentially more difficult. The internet, like it or not, has created a situation where you have to rise above a certain threshold for you to even as much as exist in the minds of potential customers. Which means there's a way to do it and there are many ways to waste your time and money while doing nothing but remain below the visibility threshold.

You don't have to like it.

You do have to understand that there's a way to do it in order to succeed and a way to die trying.

If you are not willing to understand the realities of selling today, again, with respect, find a job.

If I were to drop you in the ocean five km from shore with nothing but your clothes, your survival depends on several things:

  - Accepting your reality
  - Wanting to survive
  - Knowing how to swim with minimal effort in open water
  - Start swimming

As it applies to selling:

Accepting your reality means that you have to understand you are not going to succeed at selling unless you stop being judgmental about how selling has to be done today. That doesn't mean becoming a scam artist. Reputable companies like Ford and Hewlett Packard have to adapt their sales strategy to market realities. Only then can you have a plan that will lead to survival.

Wanting to survive should be obvious. Entrepreneurship is hard. If you are going to reject sales and marketing for ideological reasons that are not in alignment with reality, go find a job. You won't survive.

Knowing how to swim. Most people would drown if they were dropped into the ocean far from shore. This is true even if they know how to swim in a swimming pool. If you are going to survive in that environment, the day I drop you into the ocean should not be the first time you experience it. You need to train. And fail. And train some more. And learn how to swim in open water. As someone who learned to swim long distance in open water, I can tell you it is very different from messing around in a swimming pool.

Finally, start swimming. If you want to sell your product, you have to start. And you can't invent a new way to sell just because you don't know how or don't like how selling is done today. Don't invent a new open water swim stroke when you are 5 km from shore. You will not survive the experience.

In short, I think you have a decision to make. If you want to be an entrepreneur, get with the program. Or not, and just find a job.

Sorry for the tough love. I hate seeing people waste their time.

Thanks for your reply, I appreciate it.

I never said I’m against marketing or sales. At my current stage, after building two products with the “build it and they will come” mentality, I think I understand the importance of marketing and branding way better than many other engineers.

The essence of my original comment, was pointing out the fact that from entire pose of the OP, only 1-2 paragraphs were dedicated to marketing, mainly with vague statements such as “I started to post on twitter, sometimes also jokes”.

On top of all that, marketing today is seen as beating the algorithm. And the algorithm changes every Thursday. So last week people were posting questions, today they are posting motivational quotes.

I don’t have the mental capacity, and desire, to participate in such games. I have moral principles, and I believe there is more than one way to achieve my goals. And the way I chose, might be harder and longer, but more aligned with what I want.

As I said, in theory. Maybe I should better have said in a naive theory, but it does not seem to uncommon that the argument is made that people will just find other job if their current job disappears which, at least to some extent, implies flexibility in what kind of jobs someone can do.

Ignoring everything, I also think it would be natural that everyone has the same wage - if you work for an hour it costs you an hour of your lifetime, no matter what you do. You get a bonus for unpleasant, physically demanding, or dangerous work. Every deviation from that due to supply and demand seems generally undesirable. For unskilled labor the abundance of supply - everyone can do unskilled labor - is used to bring the wages down to the bare minimum, often in combination with those jobs being unpleasant work. On the other end a lack of supply allows workers to demand inflated salaries compared to their time investment taking money away from everyone consuming products and services they are involved in.

And I am aware that we need some differential in wage levels to steer what kind of jobs people want to take and that some jobs need longer education and therefore should pay more to compensate for the time spend in education and whatnot. This is just what I think should be the ideal situation under completely idealized and unrealistic circumstances. Or phrased in another way, I think it would be good to make policies that try to make everyone earn the same amount as long as they do not compromise important signaling functions of wage differentials.

For this particular example, I think there were worthy contenders in the era, like Minix, GNU Hurd, BSD etc. So it was rather a sum of unpredictable contingencies (in the philosophical sense) that made Linux the thing that was to be, rather than any substantial merit of its inventors; much like Facebook won the social network race by simply being lucky to launch in a cool, selective and influential community.

But in the general case, I do not claim that the world works according to a pre-written script, on the contrary, if you act with a sufficient magnitude of power, I think you can alter it deterministically. Rather, I point out the immense inertia and active opposition by the powerful to you world-altering attempts, to the point where any low power action is more like playing the lottery. You might be lucky to get the that one in a million chance, but you likely won't.

If you organize your attack carefully, amass capital, workforce, hearts and minds, etc., you drastically improve your chances of success, up to the point when your reach Elon mode: you simply wish a product or thing was real, and an entire army of people shows up ready to implement it.