For fifteen years, I was the engineer who couldn’t sell. Not “wouldn’t” — couldn’t. The act of asking someone to buy something felt like a violation of a professional code I’d never articulated but deeply felt. Engineers solve problems. Salespeople sell solutions. These were different activities performed by different people, and I was firmly in the first category.
This belief cost me significantly in unrealized revenue across my consulting career and the early years of Vulpine — projects I should have won but didn’t because I couldn’t bring myself to ask for the business, and products that should have sold more because I couldn’t bring myself to promote them aggressively.
The turning point came during a conversation with a mentor who said: “Felix, you sell every day. You sell ideas to clients. You sell frameworks to teams. You sell your perspective to anyone who’ll listen. You’re just not selling the one thing that pays you.”
He was right. I was excellent at selling ideas and terrible at selling products. The distinction was entirely in my head.
The Engineer’s Sales Allergy
The allergy to selling, common among technical founders, has specific symptoms:
You describe features instead of outcomes. In my first Vulpine product listings, the descriptions read like technical specifications. Material composition. Dimensional accuracy. Manufacturing tolerances. A customer looking for a solution to their problem had to translate my engineering data into their benefit. Most customers won’t do that translation. They’ll click away to a competitor whose listing says “solves your problem in three easy steps.”
You wait for inbound interest instead of creating it. My consulting career depended on referrals and repeat clients for thirteen of its fifteen years. I never cold-emailed a prospect. Never followed up with a declined proposal. Never asked a satisfied client for a referral. The work came to me, and I assumed that was how business worked. It was how business worked slowly, at a fraction of its potential.
You under-price to avoid the value conversation. When you can’t articulate why your product is worth the price, you lower the price until the value conversation becomes unnecessary. I underpriced my consulting for years because I couldn’t bring myself to justify what the work was actually worth.
You confuse selling with manipulation. The deepest root of the allergy. I believed that selling required convincing people to buy things they didn’t need. This is manipulation, and I was right to be allergic to it. But selling — real selling — is helping people who have a problem understand that you have a solution. The act is informational, not manipulative.
The Breakthrough
The breakthrough wasn’t a sales course or a book. It was a conversation with a customer.
In early 2021, I called a Vulpine customer who’d left a five-star review. I wanted to thank her and ask what she liked most. She said: “I almost didn’t buy. Your listing didn’t explain how it would help me. I only bought because a friend recommended you.”
That sentence haunted me. A customer who needed our product, who would have loved our product, who did love our product — almost didn’t buy because I hadn’t explained the value clearly enough.
My failure to sell wasn’t protecting customers from manipulation. It was preventing customers from finding solutions. The allergy I’d cultivated for fifteen years was hurting the people I was trying to help.
That reframe changed everything. Selling became an act of service: I have something that solves your problem, and my job is to make sure you know it exists, understand how it helps, and can access it easily.
What I Actually Learned
Selling is listening first. The best sales conversations I’ve had at Vulpine, at Startup Burgenland, and in my current work all start with questions, not pitches. What’s your problem? What have you tried? What does success look like? The answers tell me whether my product is relevant and how to frame it in terms the buyer cares about.
The ask is the easy part. Everything before the ask is harder: understanding the customer’s problem, building trust, demonstrating competence, explaining value. If you do those well, “would you like to buy this?” is a natural conclusion, not an awkward intrusion.
Follow-up is where revenue lives. Most sales require multiple touchpoints. The first email goes unanswered. The second gets a brief reply. The third starts a conversation. The fourth closes the sale. I used to send one email and interpret silence as rejection. Now I follow up five times, because the data shows that most sales happen between the third and fifth contact.
The 70/30 rule is real. When I shifted my time allocation from mostly building to mostly selling, Vulpine’s revenue grew dramatically. The products didn’t get better — they were already good. The selling got better, which meant more people knew about the products that were already good.
The Daily Practice
Selling is a skill. Like every skill, it improves with boring consistency. Here’s my daily sales practice:
Morning (10 minutes): Review yesterday’s sales data. Note any customer inquiries that need response. Identify one outreach action for today.
Midday (30 minutes): Execute the outreach action. One email to a potential partner. One follow-up to a past inquiry. One new product listing optimization. One social media post about a customer success story.
Afternoon (15 minutes): Respond to all customer inquiries received today. Every inquiry is a potential sale, and response speed correlates directly with conversion rate.
Total daily sales time: 55 minutes. This modest investment, sustained over months, produces compound results that feel disproportionate. Not because any single action is powerful. Because the accumulation of consistent action is the mechanism by which sales pipelines fill.
The 15-Year Regret
I don’t often indulge in regret. But the fifteen years I spent avoiding sales is the one decision I’d reverse if I could.
If I’d learned to sell at 25 instead of 40, the consulting practice would have grown faster. The transition to product building would have been smoother. Vulpine would have reached profitability sooner. The frameworks I developed would have reached more people earlier.
The letter to my 25-year-old self starts with “learn to sell.” Not because it’s the most important skill. Because it’s the skill that multiplies all other skills. Technical excellence multiplied by zero sales ability equals zero revenue. Technical excellence multiplied by modest sales ability equals a business.
If you’re a technical founder reading this with the same allergy I had — the vague discomfort, the feeling that selling is somehow beneath you — I have one request.
Call one customer today. Ask them why they bought. Ask them what almost stopped them. Ask them what you could explain better. That conversation will teach you more about selling than any book, and it will feel nothing like the manipulation you’re afraid of.
It will feel like helping. Because that’s what selling is.
