The Technical Co-Founders Chasm: Sales and Marketing

Earlier today I was talking to a Shotput Ventures company that just launched an awesome product and is starting the transition to the hardest part: building a customer acquisition machine. You see, for most technical co-founders, writing code and creating a product is fun — it’s easy and natural. The hardest thing is making the change over to focus on sales and marketing. There’s a chasm.

Here’s how to figure out if you’re in that chasm:

• You know you need to talk to prospects but you find yourself adding more features to the product
• You need to work on landing pages for a pay-per-click campaign but you find yourself adding more features to the product
• You realize writing content for your blog is needed to drive traffic but that one more feature in the product is where you spend your time

Do you see the patten? It is more fun to work on the product, as it comes naturally. Sales and marketing is tough. But, at the end of the day, building a company is even tougher. Revenue is the life blood of the company. It’s time to sell.

What do you think? Have you seen technical co-founders get stuck in the chasm not being able to make the shift to building a customer acquisition machine?