I'm a developer who had to learn to sell

Code doesn't care if you're shy.

Clients do.

I built my first website at twelve. Alone, at night, with free online courses. Nobody in my family ran a business. Nobody sat me down to explain what a quote was, or how to say a price out loud without apologising for it.

So I learned the part that could be learned at night. Code.

The other part had to be learned in daylight. In front of people.

The developer's favourite lie

Most developers I know believe the same thing. I believed it too.

If the work is good enough, it sells itself.

It's a lovely idea. It lets you stay at your desk. It turns not selling into a kind of integrity.

It's also false. Good work doesn't sell itself. Good work sells itself to people who already know it exists. Everyone else has never heard of you, and your beautiful code won't knock on their door.

At the end of 2012, when Yeray and I wanted to sell websites, he raised a question: could we sell without even having a website of our own? The developer in me would have built the shop window first. His question went straight to whether anyone would buy.

That's a developer and a seller in one sentence.

A developer wants to finish the product before talking to anyone. A seller wants to talk to someone before there's a product. The business needs both, preferably in the same week.

What I had to unlearn

I thought selling was talking. Convincing. Having an answer for everything, like the guy in the cheap suit.

I'm bad at that. I suspect most people who are good at code are.

What I eventually understood is that the selling that works for someone like me looks a lot more like debugging. Somebody tells you something is broken. You ask questions until you understand what's actually broken, which is rarely what they said first. Then you explain, in plain words, how you'd fix it and what it costs.

No pitch. No pressure. Just a bug report from a human being.

The hardest part was never the conversation. It was the price. Saying a number and then shutting up. Not filling the silence with a discount nobody asked for.

I still find that silence uncomfortable. I've just stopped running from it.

Why I can't delegate it yet

There's a comfortable fantasy for technical founders: one day you'll hire someone to sell, and you'll go back to the code.

Maybe. But right now, with a small company and no investors paying for a sales team, the person who understands the problem best is the one who'll have to build the fix. Handing that conversation to someone else would mean hearing about the client's problem second-hand.

And this year we're starting to think in products. A product built from second-hand problems is a product built for nobody.

So I sell. Badly at first. A bit less badly now.

I learned code at night because nobody could see me getting it wrong.

Selling, it turns out, you can only get wrong in public.

P.S. For the record, the right question in 2012 wasn't mine. Admitting it in public is part of the training.