You have signups but no revenue. Here is the sequence to your first signed deal

2017, my first SaaS

A product I was proud of, and a complete inability to explain in thirty seconds why anyone needed it. The result was zero revenue. Not "small", not "growing slowly". Zero.

Two years later I launched on ProductHunt and took third place. Five hundred signups in a day. Revenue was zero again. That was the first time I suspected the problem was not that too few people saw me.

If you are reading this with a finished product that has no sales, the product is most likely not the problem. The problem is that nobody taught you to sell, and the skill itself looks like something foreign and slightly indecent.

A good product without sales looks exactly like a bad one.

What you have already tried

You have most likely watched the YC lectures and read a dozen articles about pitching. The problem is not that they are bad. The problem is that they are scattered tips for someone else's context: a different market, a different deal size, a different stage. They do not add up to a sequence of actions for tomorrow.

Maybe you asked founders you know. That is more useful, but the sample is one person with one story, and you do not know what in it was the cause and what was coincidence.

Maybe you just wrote emails and made calls at random. That is an honest route and it works. But you learn at the speed of your mistakes, and each mistake costs a month and a few burned contacts that you cannot open a second time.

Why not hire a salesperson

It seems logical: I build the product, and sales are handled by someone who knows how. At a late stage that is true. At an early stage it is not, and here is why.

Your first salesperson does not know your product and your customer the way you do. They need a ready offer, a clear segment and a script that works. That is exactly what you do not have yet. They will come to you for it.

And with salary and lost months it will cost noticeably more than the price of the guide. Plus the main thing: if they leave, the knowledge leaves with them. A founder who has taken one deal to a signature keeps that skill for good, and later hires with a clear idea of what exactly to check.

The first hundred sales cannot be delegated: it is not a job, it is market research.

What changed when I stopped guessing

The first paying customer brought $2.4K MRR within three months. Not because the product got better. It did not change. What changed was who I talked to about it and how.

The price went $29 → $99 → $299. At $29 nobody bought. At $299 sales tripled. Pricing turned out to be positioning, not math, and it took me two years to understand that.

By month eighteen it was $50K MRR. In December 2020, a €46K contract with a committee of seven and a six-month deal cycle. I sold the company in 2024. Everything inside the guide I did with my own hands. I did not assemble it from other people's articles.

What I do not promise

I do not promise that your product will start selling because you read the guide. If the market does not need the product, a better offer will only find that out faster. That, by the way, is a useful result too.

I do not promise it will be comfortable. First discovery calls are unpleasant for everyone, and reading does not fix that. Only repetition does.

I promise something else: you will have a sequence, not a set of tips. What to do this week, what to check, which reply counts as a signal and which as noise. And four deals taken apart email by email, so you can see how it looks in reality and not in theory.