Saved

You should be selling. I don’t mean running drip campaigns. I don’t mean running ads. I don’t mean pitching. I mean authentic, meaningful, organic selling. You should talk to the people you want to be your customers and go deep. Find their objections. Find the thing that sparks excitement. Don’t settle for “that sounds useful” - that’s a bullshit phrase that means your idea is garbage. Find a new customer or find a new idea. Find the customer where it clicks, the partnership and excitement is there, and they represent your early TAM. That is selling.

The recognition was we were relying too much on “data” - analytics - and enterprise conversations. They were the easy solutions. Both are easy access. Both are wrong in our case.

I didn’t actually connect that what I was doing early days at Sentry was sales. I was hanging out at conferences, sharing my opinions, sharing beers with my peers. I was giving presentations talking about how we approached Open Source or how I glued some of our database infrastructure together. I didn’t connect it to sales because I wasn’t shilling bullshit. I was selling my values, my beliefs, my expertise. At the same time I was validating and improving Sentry in these organic conversations.

sales and marketing are not the solution to your problem - just the same way as abstract analytics aren’t going to tell you why a feature doesn’t have engagement.

It’s up to the product team - PMs, engineers, designers - to do the selling, to go deep, to be critical, and to sell the product until it sells itself. Your account reps will assist when you get there, but they’re not going to get you to PmF.

tl;dr Product-market fit isn’t about revenue or analytics It’s about customers selling your product for you You can’t outsource finding it to sales or marketing Focus on your true ICP, even if it means building something that won’t scale initially