I’ve always been more interested in making something than selling it. That instinct serves the craft, but it can be dangerous for the business. Building offers control and a concrete result; earning customer trust and adoption requires getting out of that comfort zone.

Andy Budd, who has spent the past five years working with early-stage founders, describes the handoff:

Founders often assume that once they’ve built something significantly better, the hardest part is behind them. In reality, once the fun product-shaping bit is done, a different kind of work starts.

You have to get strangers to care. You have to explain the problem repeatedly without becoming boring, show the product, make videos, write posts, go to events, ask customers for introductions and follow up with people who didn’t reply. You have to sit through sales calls where somebody spends 25 minutes explaining their procurement process, and hear “this looks great, come back next year” over and over again.

Making the product better can become a way to avoid selling it.

So they retreat to where they feel useful.

They decide the onboarding needs improving. They rebuild the dashboard. They add the feature three prospects mentioned. They convince themselves that sales are slow because the product isn’t quite good enough yet and that one more release will finally make the market pay attention.

Sometimes they’re right. But often they’re polishing the product because polishing the product feels like progress, while trying to persuade people to change deeply embedded behaviour mostly gives you rejection, indifference and unanswered emails.