It blows my mind. Here you are. Building the most complex software products in the world. They’re beautiful, they do their things really well. But you’re not making any money with them. You’re not cashing in! Everyone else seems to make a buck but not you. I’ve been a technologist for most of my professional life. I love building things. I love breaking things. But I also build software because it can scalable make me money. “Build it and they will come” I always thought. I had listened to the pain points of my prospective customers (often myself) and had come up with an elegant solution written in Ruby or Lisp, running as a website in HTML, CSS and Javascript. But actually selling what I had to offer? I’m sure you’re thinking “Ew, sales. That’s just for those pushy sales guys who wear popped collars on weekends and date dumb blondes.”–Harsh judgments aside, it turns out that unless you sell me your stuff, be it software, hardware, voting for your project, liking your Facebook post, making an intro to a cool new person, I won’t do it. Do you want to make money? Then sell me. It floors me how we as a entrepreneurial community thrive on the “rags to riches” narrative, how we thrive on customer development and building ultra-scalable business models but crumble when it comes to actually selling them. **_Please, sell me_** I’m serious. Sell me. If you have a product or service you believe in and that you spent your savings and your weeks and weekends on perfecting. For the love of god. Sell me. Explain to me my benefits. Why should I be spending even a minute to consider to give you my money, my time or my endorsement. Sell me on how what you have fits into what I’m struggling with. Relate to me. Now, the first thing seems to be building one of those long-scroll parallax landing pages with lots of engaging images and icons and boxes of text. No. I want you to throw that away and instead write up 4 paragraphs why and how your product or service benefits me. Write it black on white. Simple. My benefits. Oh, and just so you know: I don’t care about you or how much money you want to make. Or how you want to make money to travel the world. Seriously. I care about myself first, then my friends and family. **_Tell me your story_** Once you’ve been able to get my attention by giving me good reasons to listen to you, please also sell me your story. How did you come up with your product? What did your first prototype look like. What worked and what didn’t? What did you learn? Who _are_ you? A single person, a team, a country? Tell me how you came about it and show me how and why you care. In fact, I think you should take a storytelling class for that. **_Make me feel it_** And make me feel it. Take me to another place. Seduce me. Make me want to want whatever you have. Tease me. Be funny. Recently, a friend of mine who is running an entertainment company of sorts (Think Disneyland for adults minus the sex) was wondering why he couldn’t get new customers as easily as he had hoped. Their product is solid. Their value proposition is solid. Their games are really, really fun. But what he was missing out on was to transport me to the place he wanted me to experience. Don’t be boring, be daring! What’s my world look like with your product? (Don’t worry. My BS-detectors are good enough to notice if your pitch is full of it but no one says, you can’t transport me from where I am sitting right into the middle of an exciting adventure that you want me to experience.) And even if you’re working on something “boring” such as a B2B Saas business, I’m confident you can take that and turn it into something new, something exciting and profoundly emotional. We humans make decisions based on our emotions and rationalize them by thought. Use this to your (and my) advantage and take me all the way. Seduce me. **_Make it easy_** It’s funny. You’ve told me my benefits, you’ve told me your story, you even made me really feel it. But then you’re not telling me what my next step is. You flounder at closing the deal. This is it, this is the part where I turn from an excited prospect to a paying (time, money, endorsements) customer. How do I go to there?! In fact. I want you to show me exactly what to do next. For example, give me one single button on your page. Not five. One. You’re the expert and I’ve come to trust you. Don’t lose me now or we’ll both be sorry, baby. But here’s the twist. You can follow each and every one of the steps and approaches I just told you. You still have to really, really think hard about what makes your offering a no-brainer for me. Let me ask you now: What’s the absolute no-brainer reason for me to pay for your service? We’re not talking about individual benefits, technicalities or emotional bonds. What’s your no-brainer?