My First Year in Sales as a Technical Founder
Source: Fabian Dietrich · HN discussion
Fabian Dietrich is a technical founder (programming and design background) who spent a year learning sales because paying customers—not features—were the bottleneck. His write-up is rare: a funnel with real numbers, not a LinkedIn guru thread. Last 30 days on LinkedIn cold outreach: 487 connection requests → 175 accepted → 43 replies → 15 interested → 11 discovery calls → 8 held → 4 signed pilot agreements → 2 paid clients. That is a 0.4% close rate from top of funnel. Brutal, honest, and exactly why tech people need to read it. Sales is a life skill engineers keep hoping to route around. Most cannot forever.
- High-touch beats self-serve when you are early and underpriced. Low-end B2B SaaS ($10–50/mo) can live on marketing alone—the indie hacker dream—but Dietrich argues it leaves money on the table and is harder than it looks. Video calls, 1:1 email, even tailored product work built trust and let him charge more. The risk is the “agency trap”: every customer becomes a custom project. He thinks more startups die from weak marketing and never talking to buyers than from over-selling.
- ICP is earned, not assumed. Ideal Customer Profile work meant asking who benefits, who pays, and who will actually buy—then iterating with unpaid pilots and A/B tests on offers and segments. Generous pilots filtered serious buyers: a friendly two-page agreement before 10+ hours of setup and AI credits per prospect. They still have not nailed ICP; that honesty is the point.
- The funnel is a numbers game; rejection is the default. HN reader Gooblebrai called this out explicitly: 487 to 2 paid makes ghosting normal, not personal. Dietrich says the same—thick skin, rejection as data. Fellow founder jackconsidine added the iteration angle: SEO and ads are slow signal for early products; a hundred emails can tell you in a night whether the offer lands.
- You do not need a sales persona—you need curiosity. Dietrich dreaded calls, tried weather small talk, felt awkward. What worked: being his slightly introverted self, explaining the product honestly, and asking prospects about their business, industry, and ICP. Calendly cut scheduling friction; pen-and-paper notes beat AI meeting summaries for CRM entry. retube on HN hates Calendly links in cold outreach—feels like the seller will not do the tiny work of proposing a time. Worth A/B testing; the principle is remove friction without signaling you do not care.
- Channel choice has legal and creep boundaries. Dietrich favors LinkedIn for intent (comments, reactions, in-house AI lists) over saturated cold email. mrfumier pushed back hard on scaling email in the EU: GDPR consent rules, fines, blacklisting—not “democratic outreach.” elorant called personalized outreach from scraped public comments intrusive. Tech founders love automation; compliance and trust are part of the stack too.
- Coaching beats heroics for many introverts. amoorthy (technical co-founder) paid ~$2k/month for a sales coach, used Objective Management Group-style aptitude assessment, and felt competent after ~4 months. Suggests recording calls and using AI critique with that assessment as context—cheaper than coaching, not a full substitute. anitil noted HN skews introverted; moomoo11’s “just talk to people” misses that gap. elemdos: impossible if you fear rejection—which is trainable, not a character flaw.
- HN’s cynical thread is worth sitting with. AndrewKemendo and pramsey describe enterprise sales as personal promises you cannot always guarantee—staring at the ceiling after saying “we’ll get it done.” brazukadev flips it: selling a good product is easy; building one is hard. Dietrich’s post is the messy middle—still proving the product through pilots, not closing Fortune 500 on faith. coole-wurst asked if 2/487 is worth imitating; fair question. The answer is not “copy his conversion rate” but “copy the loop”: talk → qualify → pilot → learn.
- Founders never fully outsource the biggest deals. tschellenbach (Stream, ~$2M ARR solo early on) still shows up for large deals at a 140-person company. Sales at scale is a team sport; at the start it is founder sport.
The takeaway: If you build things for a living, schedule one sales experiment this month—not a landing page tweak, ten real conversations with people who might pay. Use Dietrich’s funnel as a sanity check: hundreds of nos per yes is normal. Track stages. Iterate the offer before you iterate the code. Read the HN thread for GDPR, ethics, and temperament—not to scare yourself out of selling, but to sell without becoming either a spam cannon or a wolf-of-Wall-Street caricature.
Related TMFNK Content
- Thinkism and the Teacher’s Dilemma Understanding follows doing—same shape as learning sales by talking to prospects, not reading one more framework post.
- Know Your Customers’ Jobs to Be Done Why “fit” on discovery calls is not performative; customers hire products to make progress in a circumstance.
- The Hard Truth About Business Model Innovation When the business model—not the feature set—is what you are actually selling.
- MIT GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 Enterprises pour budget into customer-facing sales and marketing while most AI pilots never ship—signal vs. spend.
- ACQ2: The Art of Selling Enterprise Software with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott The other end of the spectrum: career sales leadership at scale, useful once your two paid clients become twenty.
- The Enterprise Context Layer Why GTM reps fail when retrieval tools cannot answer “should I even promise this?"—sales is judgment, not scripts.
Also worth a look on TMFNK: Optimal Interview Preparation (feedback loops under pressure), Collaboration Inflation (when talking to people is the work), Jeff Bezos 2020 Letter to Shareholders (customer obsession as operating principle), Principles and Practices of Gap-Closing Investing (founder-market fit and “distance traveled”—parallel to ICP iteration).
Crepi il lupo! 🐺