To Sell is Divine

I spent this year learning to sell. By that, I mean I made an intentional effort towards understanding distribution.

At the start of the year, I didn’t consider myself a salesperson. I associated it with a kind of cunning even. Sales was a discipline for charming extroverts, people who could tell stories and convince others of ideas that maybe didn’t have the legs to stand on their own.

But after a year of pushing compression socks and stablecoin applications, my position has changed significantly.

Before There’s a Product

The simplest distinction between art and product is that art is expressive and product is functional. But that’s not enough.

A thing can exist as both art and product. As art, it exists as an outcome of the interaction between creator and material. As product, it exists as value that someone else might be willing to exchange.

This distinction can be evident from the beginning. Sales starts when you consider the question: who is this for, and why would they want it? The exchange isn’t always money. Sometimes it’s time.

I’ve made a lot of things that never became products, not because they couldn’t be, but because of my limited consideration for who else might want them or why. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a choice that keeps you from certain possibilities.

With Main Squeeze, the question was: can we make compression socks cool enough that people will buy them? And this premise guided everything—design decisions, material choices, how we talked about the product. We were thinking about exchange from day one.

Sales, in this sense, is choosing to make something that exists in relationship with other people, not just in isolation.

Building It

Once you’ve chosen to make a product, sales influences how you build.

At HIFI, my role in sales is mostly about execution—delivering what the GTM team promises and communicating progress well. But that requires tight alignment between what we’re building and what we’re selling. The product idea and the sales idea have to be in sync.

Bad sales happens when these are discordant. When salespeople don’t understand the product they’re selling, or when they promise capabilities that don’t exist. There’s room for exaggeration in storytelling, but not for lies about what the product can actually do.

Good sales requires deep product understanding. Whoever is selling needs to know both the vision and the constraints well enough to creatively imagine with customers without straying too far from what’s possible.

For founders, this is critical: you need to lead whatever aspect of sales you’re good at—branding, partnerships, marketing, whatever. You can have dedicated sales people, but you can’t delegate the alignment work. The strategic direction comes from internal conviction about what should exist. Sales helps determine how that thing comes to life.

Getting It to People

Distribution is where theory meets reality, and where I learned that sales isn’t one thing—it’s completely different depending on what you’re selling and who you’re selling to.

HIFI needs API documentation, developer relations, enterprise partnerships. Main Squeeze needs e-commerce infrastructure, community events, chronic illness advocacy. Fable needs app stores, creator communities, viral mechanics.

The principle is the same—connect what you made with people who value it—but the infrastructure required is radically different.

Sales, I’ve learned, is fundamentally about choosing who you’re for. Bad sales tries to be everything to everyone. Good sales is specific. It’s about finding the people for whom this thing is meaningful, and building the systems to reach them.

As Main Squeeze evolved, we started to focus more on travel and people with chronic illness who need compression socks but are underserved by existing options. And that choice changed our strategy and messaging.

Sales isn’t about convincing people to want something they don’t. It’s about finding the people who already need what you’ve made, and making it easy for them to discover it.

Learning From It

Sales is also a research function.

This might be the most surprising thing I learned. The sales process—talking to customers, seeing what resonates, watching what converts—is how you discover what people actually need, what language works, what constraints matter, what possibilities exist in the market.

At Main Squeeze, watching the Shopify numbers tick up week after week taught us things we couldn’t have known otherwise. Getting an email from an editor at The Independent thanking us for making the socks showed us it was working. Every sale was feedback.

At HIFI, week-to-week product delivery is heavily influenced by what customers ask for, all aligned toward revenue growth. The sales team brings intelligence back from customer conversations that shapes what we build next. Not the core strategy, but tactical execution and prioritization.

This creates a feedback loop: sales informs product, better product makes sales easier, which brings more feedback. The goal is to eventually create a flywheel—a self-sustaining system where customers bring other customers through exclusivity, reward, or just the quality of the thing itself.

Making It Sustainable

The final piece is about alignment—not just between product and sales, but between making and money.

I used to think I didn’t need anything from anyone. I made things for myself, and if no one wanted them, that was fine. But what I’ve realized is that’s not independence—it’s limitation. It means you’re always splitting energy between the things you make and the things that pay bills.

Sales, done right, aligns productive effort with commercial reward. Making money isn’t just validation—it’s efficiency. It means you can be a full-time maker instead of a part-time maker with a side hustle.

This year, through Main Squeeze, HIFI and Fable, I learned that I want people to use what I make. I want their feedback because it makes me better at making. Sales creates the conditions for that exchange—where I get better at my craft and they get something valuable.

It’s mutually beneficial, not extractive. And that reframe changes everything.

If you’re a maker who thinks sales is anti-creative, here’s a different way to think about it:

Sales is choosing who you’re for. It’s building with exchange in mind. It’s the research function that tells you what’s working. It’s what allows you to keep making instead of splitting your time. It’s the work of connecting what you made with the people it matters to.

It’s not separate from the creative process. When done right, it’s part of it.