Nobody cares about your product. They care about their problem

I could talk about our product for an hour.

How it's built. Why we chose this and not that. The detail that took a week and nobody will ever see.

Nobody has ever asked me to.

The developer's curse

I'm a developer before I'm anything else. I learned at night, on my own, and what I enjoy most is making things work.

That's a great quality for building a product. It's a terrible quality for selling it.

Because when you've built something, you want to show how it works. The screens. The options. The clever part. You think that if people understand it, they'll want it.

They won't. Or not for that reason.

People don't buy software. They buy a problem going away.

What a club actually wants

Take PagoCRM, our platform for sports clubs to collect their fees.

I could describe it with features. Payment plans. Teams. Templates. Reports.

Now picture a typical club treasurer. Not a real one, just the kind I imagine when I think about who this is for. Nobody like that wakes up wanting templates. They wake up with a list of families who haven't paid yet. With a spreadsheet that doesn't add up. With the prospect of an awkward conversation at the side of the pitch, asking a parent for money that should have been paid last month.

That's the problem. Chasing fees by hand. Usually done by someone who already has another job and does this for the club in their spare time.

If I start talking about templates, I've lost them. If I start talking about that list of families, they lean in.

Your product is the answer. Nobody listens to an answer until they've heard their question.

Why this isn't a sales trick

You might think this is just a way of pitching better. Talk about pain, then sell the cure.

For me it's something more basic. Our products come from problems we've seen repeated with clients, not from an idea on a napkin. PagoCRM exists because clubs kept asking us for the same thing. The problem came first. The product came after.

So when I sell it, the honest thing is to go back to where it came from. Not "look what we built". But "this is what was happening to you, and this is how it can stop happening".

If the club doesn't have that problem, the product isn't for them. And that's fine. I'd rather find out in the first five minutes than after a demo with forty screens.

What I'm unlearning

It's harder than it sounds.

Every time I explain the product, I feel the pull of the details. The clever part. The thing I'm proud of. I have to stop myself and go back to that imaginary treasurer, the spreadsheet and the conversation at the side of the pitch.

Being proud of how something works is fine. It's just not the client's job to share that pride.

Their job is to run a club. Ours is to give them one less thing to worry about.

If they never find out how it works inside, that's probably a sign we did it well.

P.S. If you ever want the hour-long version about how it's built, I'm available. Bring coffee. Bring a lot.