We, developers, commonly believe that the only requisite for one of our creations to be sold is to make it awesome and valuable. While that might work in some cases where you press the right psychological triggers, the chances that those are the only requirements are very low. You need to sell.

Selling is not something new to me. My family owns a cafe in Spain. We sell a common breakfast called churros. When I was a kid, I helped the family on Saturdays and Sundays to earn a few bucks that I could use to buy gadgets. It taught me a lot about the value of money, at a local cafe scale, and also about the importance of treating your customers well and showing yourself engaging, listening to them, and remembering the things you talk about. Once you build a connection that way, they are likely to come back and buy more.

This muscle atrophied for me. I spent years coding, mostly using my brain in logical mode. And sales are not logical. It reminds me of my nerve injury from a year ago, whose recovery consists of ensuring there's stimulation to prevent the atrophy of the connection between nerve and muscle. I think my ability to sell is there, but it needs some work to bring it back. The only way to do so is by using it more and more, and parking the logical side for a bit, which feels uncomfortable at first because that's where I fall back. But I'm getting more and more comfortable with the sales part of Tuist.

As I mentioned, selling churros or selling a tech product to large enterprises are different scales, but some of the ideas map. And as soon as you realize that, you start to notice how many things you were doing wrong. I'll give you some examples.

Tuist is a product company. We go deep and broad understanding problems and building the best craft for them, and we share about it in a way that's magnetic. Developers show up at our door in our community forum and Slack channels. Fun fact: we have sales representatives of CI companies around there, I guess trying to fish from our amazing community. I wouldn't say that we are lucky, but we worked on it for many, many years and we have the dividends now. In sales terms, cold outreaches are not needed. In fact, they are not effective, and Tuist has a strong brand that keeps growing through its community.

But here's where we do things wrong. Once they join, we've traditionally been support-oriented. We answered their questions and that's it. We didn't go deep into understanding what brought them to Tuist in the first place, what are the pain points where Tuist can bring value through a solution. This was our first mistake or a big missed opportunity, and something that we've changed not so long ago. Many of those prospects, as they like to call them in the sales lingo, turn out to be leads, and very happy leads if you hold their hands.

And here's the thing. From what I've seen in many other tech companies, sooner or later they are replaced with sales teams that don't have a technical background, or they learn the basics so that they can sell. While I get it from the perspective that you need to scale your sales, I think this is where you are trading short-term sales scalability for long-term product atrophy. You've become so distant from the people that you build for, and developers are not stupid, they realize that too. On one side, you are not as enticing a product as you were at the time you spoke at every conference, and second, you are so detached from their day to day that you evolve the product reactively, and again, everyone notices it. I'm not sure how scaling of sales will look at Tuist, but we'll aim at having the people that make the product possible right there, in those conversations, and we'll join them, because the expertise is something that's part of the package. Founder-led sales, they call it.

At the family cafe when people stood in the queue, we spent some time talking with them. Of course, you wouldn't talk about their problems; they are just hungry. But you'd talk about life and other things, and those people would likely come back because they felt like they were at home. Now, in digital services, like Tuist is, there's no physical space where those meetings can casually happen, no queue. So you need to build a similar thing, a digital space where those conversations can happen, and a system so that you don't forget about them because we have monkey brains and we can't remember everything, and this is a limitation we need to build a system for. In our case, we started using Attio very actively. We keep track of every conversation, adding ourselves follow-up tasks so that we keep those conversations warm. It takes practice to build the habit. It doesn't come naturally to write down everything you talk about, but it's critical to have that context there so that your follow-up conversations don't become just an "I'm here to do a follow-up" and become more of a "this thing you mentioned, the team has worked on addressing it, and I'd like to talk about where things stand and figure out next steps." Will Attio be with us forever? Maybe? I quite like it, and now we spend some time every day having those conversations. They are very insightful because we learn a lot about them, and it also gives us ideas about the things that we prioritize. And here's another thing: we became much better at prioritizing tasks because we don't waste time building things that we think people would need. At times we do. We've built a culture where we explore new ideas, and this is core to the DNA of the company and the project, but it's crucial that we balance that with solving the immediate needs of customers. For example, I want to start the Okta login from the Tuist login page and not the Okta instance. Something we've been asked for a lot.

So while churros and a B2B service are different things, they share a lot. We show our most human version to every company that shows up at our door. We listen to them, we guide them to a solution for their problems, and we have conversations at the technical level of expertise that they expect. Our sales pipeline has become very effective, and we barely have to do any cold outreach. We write great content, and our community and the value of the content do the rest. This is the company we want to build. It was daunting at first, and I personally lacked a bit of confidence at the beginning, but seeing the accounts we are working with these days, and also the impact we are having on them, I have strong confidence that Tuist is here to stay for a long time and potentially break beyond the mobile ecosystem, which we strongly tied ourselves to.