Do the founders need to be able to sell their service or product themselves?
After all, there are sales departments, CMOs, and partnership channels for that.
This is a common problem among some talented engineers and creators. Subconsciously, they crave solving exciting problems that someone else regularly brings to them. As a result, they tend to delegate demand creation, lead generation, and the sales process to anyone who expresses a willingness to do so.
As a result, either there is no stable flow of customers, or there is a flow, but no profit, as it is taken by the person who brings them in. In addition, the founders develop a legitimate paranoia that they have become dangerously dependent on a "benefactor" and could lose the business they have built up over many years at any time.
In the 90s, the "father of advertising" David Ogilvy wrote: "In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create." Today, this is even more true. If a creative or technical genius learns to generate and satisfy market demand himself, he will essentially acquire a superpower.
The key question is why some founders have an almost organic aversion to the idea of making sales themselves. I have encountered various reasons, one of which is a misconception about what it takes to make successful sales. They believe that they will need to develop qualities that are foreign to them - deceitfulness, hypocrisy, Machiavellianism, and cynicism. However, in reality, on the contrary, all that is needed is to focus their natural inventive and creative power in a different direction. This involves collaborating with customers to identify the root of their problems and unlock the hidden potential of solutions.
Yours sincerely,
-Alexander
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