---
title: "Better at selling"
date: 2026-09-27
description: "reflecting on my reluctance to show my work"
tags: ["reflection"]
canonical: "https://ruskinconstant.com/writing/better-at-selling/"
---


I need to get better at selling. 

Selling to other builders means showing your work; showing your work means being more transparent about how something is made - open source, open prompts?
Doing that digitally means capturing thoughts out my head and onto a screen. The higher that translation barrier, more tempting it is to outsource it, which compromises the quality of the authenticity. But then again, the authenticity often needs a few revisions before it feels high enough quality to bake into something I'm comfortable putting out there for the Internet to refuse to forget. And yet, the friction of process of iterating over your own raw thoughts and re-moulding them into a more refined package is what works the muscle that gets you better at a producing higher quality thought vomit.
"Never outsource a skill you're not happy losing" or something like that.

Authentic voice sells - it's more compelling to read. It feels more like you're hearing that person in your head as you read their words if you've actually met them. So I need to get better at sharing that. 

Better how? **Faster** - fast enough to share the context, and the pitch to sell new ideas or experiments at the time when they're most fresh and relevant.
~~If I believe,~~ ~~I believe,~~ I am faster than a lot of my peers at actually innovating at the fringe of newly available technological tools, but I lose the chance to demonstrate that at a wider scale by not pairing the builder effort with a sales effort within the window of hype.
I also know that my writing style is appreciated when I actually produce some, because I get encouraging feedback; often for things that I wrote ages ago. That's also moot if I don't actually strike when the iron is hot in terms of being invested in the thing that I am writing about.

Better selling? **Bolder and more resilient**. Bold enough to actually ask for something, and resilient enough to accept that it's a numbers game and there's going to be a lot of rejection while you attempt to find your users/customers/audience/tribe. There's a nerd culture that likes to sneer at the audacity of suggesting that a thing you have created is not worthy of even being presented as worth paying for unless you can somehow demonstrate that it is academically, objectively superior to any other alternative; and even then there's an adjacent noisy crowd that will then demand that it's given away for free in the name of "open source" or general rage at capitalism. 
It's much more helpful to immerse in a crowd of like-minded folks that recognise and appreciate the sales hustle as a critical piece of "shipping". 
The thing is built when it's up for "sale", not just when it's built.

There is some progress in the sense that I would previously suffer from skipping / missing the traction and value proposition validation part of the building journey as well. I don't have that problem anymore since I've focused on solving problems personal to me and my family and my team at work. And I've also got better at sharing my solution drafts between friends and colleagues who respect the experimentation and the fact that I somehow have the audacity and time to even try new tools while also grinding the 9-5.

Authentically, faster, bolder, more resilient... and with a feedback loop. It's tempting to just throw stuff out there and stay brave by completely avoiding revisiting how it actually landed. Basically shoot first, ask questions later...but you do actually need to ask those questions!