1. Love your product.

Mind you, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It might be flawed, it might not be on par with its competitors. But it’s kind of like unconditional love that creates the whole magic.

See the best thing about your product and build the whole perception of it around that fact, in your own mind first.

In one startup pitch experiment, high displayed founder passion was associated with 39% higher investor neural engagement and 26% higher informal investor interest compared with low passion.
High versus low displayed founder passion in a startup pitch experiment. Shane et al., Journal of Business Venturing (2020). Original graphic based on the reported results.

2. Don’t have a big team? Then don’t be a d*ck, you are the face of the product.

In fact, treat the product as your mirror.

If you find it hard to socialize and the majority of people genuinely dislike you, you’ve gotta work on the root cause first.

You can try to fake your personality to sell your product, but at some point your actual personality will show up in the product one way or another.

People feel you through your product.

Related research: founder narrative authenticity and brand attachment; brand consistency, congruency, and trust in 285 SMEs.

3. Be trustworthy.

People contact, and consequently buy from, those they trust.

The rule here is the same as in #2: you have to actually be trustworthy, not just fake it.

Examples?

Don’t overpromise.
Don’t disappear mid-conversation.
Don’t try to sneakily change the conditions you’ve already discussed.

Trust is mostly boring consistency.

A repeated sequence of promise, behavior, promise, and behavior leads toward trust.
My shorthand for consistency and trust, inspired by the SME brand authenticity study. Conceptual graphic, not a figure from the paper.

4. Selling something is only one half of the business.

You’ve gotta commit to your customers.

If someone purchased your product, even if it’s NOT a subscription, don’t just leave them hanging when they contact you with questions, problems, etc.

That’s something a lot of people seriously overlook, and then they end up with tons of negativity on Reddit, Trustpilot, and you name it.

Getting the money isn’t the end of the relationship.

After a customer problem, how a company responds can shape fairness, trust, loyalty, word of mouth, and switching.
Adapted as an original summary of a 147-study meta-analysis of online service recovery. A study of public complaint responses also examines how bystander comments affect reactions.

5. Be curious.

You don’t sell to abstract entities. You sell to people, even if it’s B2B.

Learn to be genuinely curious about people, learn to WANT to ask questions, figure out their problems, wishes etc.

The last thing you want is that awkward situation where you’ve managed to forcibly sell something to an already-frustrated customer.

It can take a ridiculous amount of effort to rebuild your image with that customer afterward. You don’t want this to happen, trust me.

Yeah, I’ve done it. It’s cringe-inducing for life.

Also, as you can see, this point is related to #2, #3 and #4, and might look contradictory to #1.

Yeah, love your product.

Just don’t let that love make you put Cinderella’s glass slipper on a basketball player.

Open-ended questions accounted for less than 10 percent of negotiators' utterances in the research discussed by Harvard Business Review.
One memorable number from Di Stasi, Quoidbach, and Brooks (2024). Original graphic based on their reported finding.

Further reading: question-asking and liking; listening and sales outcomes; and open-ended questions in negotiation (fewer than 10% of negotiators' utterances in the study).