this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
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Programming
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As a salesperson at a software company, I can tell you the programming is equally important as the sales. Those are the only 2 indispensable roles in a software company. One won't be able to do their job if the other doesn't.
To expand on this: the better the collaboration between sales and programming, the better for everyone involved. I have no experience on starting businesses, but it feels to me that when starting or expanding a business, one often needs to sell products that don’t exist yet. Because building something in the hopes of selling it is very risky, as the product you develop might risk not being able to properly satisfy the needs of anyone and therefore could end up not selling.
Selling something that doesn’t exist yet instead guarantees a sale and therefore funding, but sales and programming need to be aligned on the difficulty of creating said product (or adapting an existing one) and the timeline to do so.
Few things cause a bigger sense of loss in programmers than being told “we sold this thing that needs to be ready in 2 months” when the programmer knows it needs 6 months to be built correctly. It’s a fantastic recipe to make programmers miserable, product managers miserable, clients miserable, and likely sales miserable too.
Selling something that doesn't exist yet is the key. A programmer is asking us how to start a business and talking about building something. The answer is not to build right now and instead do the sales work. The programmer and the salesperson are the same in this post, and alignment is guaranteed. The most important thing is sales and the programmer needs to focus entirely on the sales discipline.
And even more important, everyone's experience with sales people is missing the most critical part of entrepreneurship - selling before a product is even defined! It's not even about selling something that doesn't exist. It's about discovering the pain the customer is before deciding on what to build
Hi. While I can agree that sales thinking is important for a business, I don't want to be a con artist.
I already had experience to working with people as that, who sells things that don't exist yet. Everything was fine till people understand that super cool product they were promised is unreal to implement (so eventually it is a scam).
The alternative is wasting your time building something no one wants. If you're going to fail, fail to implement. It's easier, faster, and costs less. If you fail to sell, you can spend literally years building something that will never make money. The reason the developer wants to start a business is to make money, not build something that works without money
I agree with this and I plan to involve potential customers as early as possible so they can realistically say if this is something they are willing to pay for. I spend a year of building my current stuff and soon I plan to release an alpha version to validate my implementation. Even if it's shit - at least I earned a lot of experience from that implementation.
Read "The Mom Test". You should never ask people if they will pay for your product
Ok, thanks, I will try to read it
Yes there's nothing more important in the early years than sales and dev being aligned. These are the greatest and most exciting times you can have in either role if you are able to understand the other side. You need to be careful to hire salespeople with technical backgrounds who really care about their clients in those early years to avoid the "throw it over the fence" mentality.