[kingkongjaffa]

> Build a product that sells itself

This is such an insane naive take, that it's actually surprising to see it posted here.

We're on a VentureCapital backed message board dedicated to startup, company growth, obsessed with valuations and $$$MONEY$$$, and one of the users thinks this is remotely true.

Companies are not built on technical merit alone. The perfect product and perfect product market fit, with 0 sales or marketing message is going nowhere.

If you have no connection to your customers, your understanding of their pain points will be 0, your relationships with them will be 0, their trust in you as a group of people will be 0.

Are there examples of it? maybe a rapid consumer growth where your 'sales force' is word of mouth among customers, then maybe it can happen, don't bank on your company being able to do that though.

And in B2B it's an entirely different game, no amount of viral word of mouth is going to make decision makers jump to the competition, those switching/churns are won through hard pitches and a coherent product and sales strategy.

[biggestdummy]

Atlassian, famously, got to very significant revenue before hiring Sales. But even they, eventually, got to a size and complexity where Sales was required. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-18/this-5-bi...

The Bloomberg article makes the point that this could be a trend. It was not. I know of no other B-to-B Enterprise Software product which got close to that kind of revenue without hiring Sales.

There are several examples of successful companies who tried this model, and then moved to a Sales model - usually at $30 or $50 million. https://www.saastr.com/eventually-everyone-has-a-sales-team/.

Of course, there's no easy way of knowing how many companies tried this model and failed. But I don't think it was successful too often, because I hardly ever see this model any longer.

[fakedang]

Stripe is a product that sold itself. I think they still manage it.

Webflow and Shopify are also some products that just sell themselves. WordPress too.

[kingkongjaffa]

each of those have a pretty prominent 'contact sales' link on the landing pages and pricing pages, so I have to heavily disagree, they all employ a sales forces.

For certain apps it might seem like they sell themselves for small users or individuals, but as soon as the customer is 'enterprise' the route is virtually always 'contact sales' like on Stripe and Webflow's landing page, on shopify's pricing page the larger tiers are also 'contact sales'.

[fakedang]

There's still a difference between having an account manager at a company, in charge of implementation and support, and an active sales force that goes out of its way to sell stuff, lie to prospects, wine and dine them, etc. Stripe, Webflow, Shopify, etc. have the former - they don't really have to sell themselves.

Enterprise needs a different "sales" channel, because most enterprises are bulky, cumbersome sloths who need handholding. At the same time, there isn't anything in particular that's stopping enterprise users from using these products on a lower tier - I've used Zapier before with blessing and no issues, on the company card, at my old job at a megafund (where we had strict restrictions on a lot of software otherwise). No questions asked.

[julienreszka]

It's not insane nor naive.