I'd be a hypocrite if I told you about my product

I've recently started working on a product doing appointment software as a side gig. I know, it's a really dumb idea considering how crowded that SaaS niche already is, but it feels like there's an opportunity for it where I live. I've gotten far enough that it's now time to start hooking things up: a prod deployment, an app on the app store, Twilio for sending SMS - well not actually Twilio because nice things don't work in Turkey - and Stripe for receiving payments - well not actually Stripe because there's no... whatever you get it. Unless you're running a charity, you also have to start selling to customers once you launch. But I've been feeling pretty reticent about that. No doubt part of that is because I'm not very comfortable speaking the language here. The thought of walking into a business a few blocks over and talking to the owner face to face is extremely nerve-wracking for an introvert such as myself. Instead of doing that, I've been procrastinating by doing some research online, reading some books (shoutout to The Mom Test) and listening to YC founders and other people who have something to say about the parts of running a company I don't feel comfortable with. I did this for a while as I went on walks at night, but after burning through the most popular stuff out there, I started feeling like a lot of these resources were just telling me to do the most obvious bs literally anyone could've told me. Clearly, at this point the right move is to just do the thing, and no one other than the hands-on experience can teach you how to do that. So I did some soul-searching and I think I have a good idea for why selling someone something I've built feels orders of magnitude harder than actually building it.

I'm at a point in my life where I feel like I'm technical enough to make most nuisances on devices I use disappear. I use NextDNS on my router to block ads at the DNS level, I have SmartTube on my TV with SponsorBlock (I also pay for YouTube premium), and a big reason why I can never use an iPhone is because it won't let me install things like Titanium browser with uBlock Origin support or use Morphe to patch APKs to remove ads from them. When I come across an unexpected ad anywhere I go "huh weird, why didn't I catch that?" and figure out how to fix the hole. When I receive stuff like this in my email, I feel like I got tricked... deceived into clicking on an email I thought was something personal but was instead an advertisement. I remember I got particularly annoyed that I couldn't report this person for spam on Fastmail.

I think I have by far the most adversarial relationship with ads of anyone I know. I don't ever want to see them, even for products I would be interested in - especially for products I would be interested in. This has been a pretty consistent stance for me as a consumer. But I'm experiencing moral quandaries with this idea now, standing on the other side of the table. And yeah, read literally any SaaS playbook or watch any sales video and they'll all tell you "oh you just have a bad idea of what sales is, because you think sales is when a shady car salesman with quotas they need to hit tries to sell you something you don't even want." They then proceed to tell the audience to instead go and pursue other approaches that feels exactly the same as the car salesman. So I disagree, I don't think I have the wrong idea about sales. I don't want to receive a personalized cold email or cold call, I don't want to see a banner ad for the exact thing I need. I only want to hear about your product from a friend who isn't benefiting financially by telling me about it, that's the only possible way it could be legitimate. But sadly that's not sales, that's just having already been successful.

I don't know how to feel about this. I look around and see that many people, like my wife, don't actually mind seeing ads for things they might be interested in using. Speaking of my wife, she went to an acquaintance's salon the other day to prep for a friend's wedding, and asked the owner what they use for appointments in the spirit of doing some research. They responded by saying "I've received 4 sales calls for different appointment software this month, is everyone working on the same thing all of a sudden?" Now that's obviously disheartening for any founder to hear, but my issue with it is that what... I'm supposed to be the 5th person who calls her? That's what'll do it? Being the 5th unwanted, annoying "appointment's witness" nuisance this salon owner will curse at under their breath for wasting their time? Your response to that might be "well how do you know your product is useless for them?" But the truth is you don't know if you're wasting someone's time until you've already started wasting it. I wouldn't ever want that to happen to me so how can I, in good conscience, do that to someone else?

When I work on software, it's important to me that everything I'm doing is ethical. I don't ever want to use dark patterns, or auto-charge for free trials and other similar rogue activity. I want to make the kind of software that would delight me to use. But what's the sales equivalent of that? How can I, as a founder, do that for sales when the only delightful sales experience is no sales at all? I realize I have an extremist view on this, and I'm definitely an outlier. I'm such a psycho on this topic that when I go to the store, I actively avoid buying products I've seen advertisements for, and go for brands I haven't heard of, in order to punish them in my own way. Sorry MrBeast chocolate bar, sorry Prime energy drink. I mean, I'm not 12 years old so I wouldn't be buying those things regardless, I guess.

It's clear that I need some more work on dealing with the cognitive dissonance that comes with the job. All great founders like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have learned to become the Dalai Lama of living in perfect harmony with conflicting ideas like receiving government support, and complaining about people who receive government support. I simply have to learn how to take a page from their book.