Founders Need to Be Ruthless When Chasing Deals

This is great advice (that we need to follow) but needs to be updated for 2026. The information value of providing (or receiving) a demo has dropped to roughly zero with vibe coding. Today, an apparently functional and useful product can be produced and demoed in minutes, but that demo provides absolutely zero information into the technical capabilities of the demoing team to follow through on promises with polish and at scale. It doesn't reflect a studied architecture or edge case handling. It basically only shows a vision, which can be tailored to perfectly mirror the recipient's expressed desire even though it's absolute vaporware. This makes it even harder to sell to enterprise in 2026 when the scene is awash in such noise.

One book I can recommend is "Gap Selling"

before I read that book and tried to sell some stuff I realized in org's there' more than 1 buyer.

in a typical b2b / gvt deal - you've 4 buyers at least.

As an aside, I love the website design. Very early 2000s vibe without costing readability (on desktop).

I wish hackernews submissions is more like this

>We’re excited. When can you come back and show us a prototype?”

When you've put your hand in your pocket.

This is such good advice.

I think new founders are sometimes intimidated by customers, especially well-known brands, we don't want to upset or annoy them instead of being open about not being able to afford to run loads of pre-sales technical work. We also see the dollar signs for one large customer when we should be seeing smaller dollar signs for many customers.

For the customers, to be fair, they are partly trying to derisk the purchasing decision by making sure everyone and their dog has seen the demo, shown that it definitely does exactly what they want with their data and processes etc. and they have no skin in the game at this point, so why not?

Believe in the product you have built already and as the OP says, be certain of product market fit and ABC (always be closing).