Selling as a technical founder.

I want to be straight about something, because the rest of this journal makes me look more complete than I am. I can build the platform. The part I am genuinely bad at is getting people to buy it. Selling is my kryptonite, and pretending otherwise would be the one dishonest thing in an otherwise honest log.

So this entry is the founder side of the same coin as the engineering: what I’m actually doing about the weak half. Some of it is working, some of it I’m figuring out in real time, and I’m leaning on a few entrepreneurial friends who are better at this than I am. If you’re a technical founder reading this, you probably recognize the shape of the problem.

The thing I built instead of learning to cold-call

Left to my instincts, I’d rather build a tool than send a cold email. So I built a tool that sends the cold email for me, sort of.

LayerKick can generate a free performance and insights report for a Shopify store I’m reaching out to. It measures how fast the store actually is, and it surfaces the things I’d normally have to explain on a call: where the time goes, what’s dragging the pages down, and what LayerKick would change. It’s the pitch, rendered as evidence about your own store instead of claims about mine.

The plan is simple and it fits how I actually work. I research Shopify stores in the range I’m built for, generate each one its own report, and reach out with it. Not “here’s my product,” but “here’s what your store is doing right now, and here’s what it could be doing.” It isn’t that I hate selling or cringe at it, I just haven’t put in the reps yet. Leading with the prospect’s own data instead of my sales pitch is the version of outreach I can do well while I build them.

If you want to see one, here’s the deal: add yourself to the waitlist and tell me your store, and I’ll run your report and send it over for free. No commitment, and the report is yours either way.

The pricing math is the real pitch

Here’s the part that actually convinces people, and it isn’t speed. It’s the bill.

A serious edge caching layer for Shopify typically runs somewhere north of $2,000 a month. An A/B testing app runs anywhere from $100 to $900 a month. Insights and app attribution is usually a third tool with its own line item. Three vendors, three subscriptions, three dashboards, and they don’t talk to each other.

LayerKick is those three things as one layer, at $200 a month during the beta. I’m not going to name the incumbents, because this isn’t about them being bad. They’re good at what they do. The point is that the same store is paying for three tools to get caching, testing, and insights separately, and the novel part of LayerKick is that these three belong together on one layer and nobody was treating them that way.

And there’s timing on top of it. Shopify’s own Smart Pricing is entering beta free for US merchants. I’m not competing with that. If you turn it on, LayerKick supports it and works alongside it. So a store that gets in during the beta ends up with caching, our A/B testing, Shopify’s pricing tests, and insights, for dramatically less than the stack it replaces. The consolidation is the wedge. The speed is what keeps you.

Beta clients and a referral I actually mean

The other honest thing about selling as a solo founder is that your first clients come from your own network before they come from strangers. I’ve done freelance work for Shopify stores for a while, and some of those relationships are becoming beta clients. That’s not a growth hack, it’s just where trust already exists.

Once LayerKick is out of beta and stable, I’m going to run a referral program, and I want it to be a real number rather than a token. If you refer someone and they become a paying client, you get their first month. At the stable price that’s around $700 in your pocket for an intro. I’d rather put that money toward the person who vouched for me than toward ads, because a vouch from someone a merchant already trusts is worth more than anything I could say about myself.

Why I’m writing this down

Founders are supposed to project total confidence about every part of the business. I think that’s how you end up with a company that’s secretly hollow in exactly the place nobody will admit to. I’d rather tell you plainly: the engineering is strong, the selling is a work in progress, and I’m attacking the weak half the same way I attack everything else, by building systems and asking for help.

And I’m eager to reach the point where I can hire people smarter than me to run sales and marketing the way they deserve to be run. Learning it myself in the meantime isn’t the end goal; it’s so that by the time I’m hiring for it I have a real, working competence in every part of this business, and the calls I make as a founder come from understanding rather than guesswork.

If you run a Shopify store and you’re curious, the report offer is real, and it costs you nothing to see your own numbers.