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founder-led-sales

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Use this skill when developers love your tool but nobody pays, you have never sold and freeze on the conversation, or deals stall on "let me think about it." Produces a repeatable first-deal motion you run yourself: finding the champion and the buyer, running discovery, demoing their use case, arming the champion, and closing your first paying customers. Triggers on "founder-led sales", "close first customers", "nobody will pay", "how do I sell this", "let me think about it", "sales discovery", "find the champion", "close the deal", "first paying customer".

skills/shane-oconnor/founder-led-sales/SKILL.md

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Repository last updated
Oct 20, 2026
License
MIT

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Applies when developers love your tool and live in the free tier but nobody pays, you have never sold and freeze on the actual conversation, or every deal dies on "let me think about it." Produces a first-deal motion you run yourself, from finding the champion to closing the buyer.

## Do the first deals yourself

Nobody can sell it before you can. Your first ten to twenty deals are not a hire, they are how you learn what you are actually selling and to whom. You cannot outsource a motion you have not cracked; a founder who hires a rep at deal one hires someone to fail at a job that does not exist yet. And it is not slimy: selling a developer tool well is discovery plus helping a champion get budget. You find the people who already have the pain and make it easy for them to say yes.

## Every real deal has four things

If one is missing, it is a conversation, not a deal. Your job is to find which:

- **Champion** — uses it, loves it, and will fight for it inside their company. Usually the developer who adopted you.
- **Buyer** — has budget. Often not the champion.
- **Pain with a cost** — a problem costing money, time, or risk now, not "this is nice."
- **Trigger** — a reason to act now: an incident, an audit, a deadline, a scaling wall.
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