I'm the Worst Seller in the World... for Now
The Worst Seller in the World, Part 1
I don’t know how to sell. I say it with shame and, at the same time, with pride. Because something in me made me believe that selling is immoral. That guys like the Wolf of Wall Street (not Leonardo’s, that dude is cool) are despicable and, at some level, con artists. Because I hate sales coaches. Because I hate those Instagram and TikTok videos of kids playing Jordan Belfort to sell some crappy website.
But I envy them. Because I make things: concepts, products, services, and I freeze when it’s time to take them out and sell them.
On top of that, as a writer I proclaimed myself an artist, and I doubled down on the belief that selling goes against art. That one and plenty of other lies I told myself so I’d feel guilty for wanting to monetize my talents. All it got me was depression, debt, and a lot of resentment toward my own art. Ten years like that. But it’s over, bitches.
This boy is going to learn how to sell. He’ll learn the tricks and the techniques, he’ll dive into the psychology behind the reasons we buy. I’ll create products and services, some genuinely useful, some deeply absurd, to understand what actually drives a sale. Every attempt logged in an article, and a beautiful final installment for you, paying reader: the whole adventure, behind the scenes, good photos, tools, and a deep dive into my magnificent mind, which is now the mind of a writer and a seller (will be, but you get the point).
I’m going to research methodologies, use tools like Claude or ChatGPT to mock up my products fast, because yes, I’m doing this alone. There will be failures, wins, drugs, drinks, fights, arguments, debts going down or going up, truths revealed, lies exposed, hair, dust, dicks and vaginas, all of it. Okay, not exactly. That’s just the adrenaline talking.
There will be sales: that’s the only thing this experiment cares about. With a few small rules imposed, obviously. I won’t try to sell anything illegal or anything that could hurt people; nothing that’s a scam, because I despise that. All legal, all in good faith.
There will be challenges, I know. One of them is that I’m in Mexico, and the market here is complicated. But I won’t close myself off to selling to a wider market outside my country. Because the internet unites us today, brothers.
Will my addiction to over-optimizing paralyze me before I ever hit the market? Will I be stopped by this belief of mine that selling is immoral? Be my witness, and let's sell and sell and sell and sell and sell until I drown in cash.
Translated from the Spanish by the author, with help from Claude.