AI & Learning Sales as an Engineer

Published over 1 year ago • 1 min read

Hey there,

It's been a while since my last update. I've written a few essays and recorded my first podcast.

Sales

While I can't connect the dots yet (btw, read the new Steve Jobs book), I'm certain learning sales will be one of the major drivers of my success in the coming years.

AI trends

Lots of folks are pontificating about AI without building anything. I don't plan to be one of them.

AI will dramatically change the go-to-market world. This is largely focused on the GTM space, but the thoughts apply to other verticals: https://drew.tech/posts/ai-meets-gtm.

I've been working on an on-device transcription app that uses Whisper to record what I'm saying all day and store it locally — creepy but useful: https://drew.tech/posts/whisper-on-device.

Last but not least, all recommendations on my blog are now powered by embeddings via OpenAI. It's wild that this work (contextual search & recommendations) previously took months of dev time, and now it takes hours: https://drew.tech/posts/ai-blog-post-recommendations.

The common theme is that the quickest way to learn is to do.

Try to sell your project to a customer, build a toy app to test out AI, or develop a new feature with ChatGPT as your pair — in short: ship.

LFG,

Drew

Infinite money glitches

Hey y'all, I've been working on SoloSync, which syncs changes from Salesforce to Notion. I'm scratching my own itch, so I wanted to test demand prior to writing too much code. Can I acquire a customer for less than one year's contract value ($99 * 12 months)? The number we're chasing here is called ROAS or return on ad spend. The higher ROAS is, the closer you are to an infinite money glitch. Here's how I tested demand. Step one: MVP My MVP is: A landing page (built with TailwindUI & Next.js...

over 1 year ago • 1 min read

Selling to developers

Hey there, A slightly more niche twist to my latest post: Selling to Developers. I've been a part of a few build vs buy decisions as an engineer and countless more as a technical advisor during Vercel sales cycles. The best type of selling is educating and that holds true with developers. Only care about technical posts? Click here to opt out of any sales/marketing/product-market fit emails. LFG, Drew

almost 2 years ago • 1 min read

2023 goals

Happy New Year! I wrote a few posts recently that might be relevant as you think about 2023: https://drew.tech/posts/posterity https://drew.tech/posts/cron https://drew.tech/posts/defaults https://drew.tech/posts/effective The last one is the most inspiring if you already feel short on time for your 2023 goals. This year, I'm focusing on building registered.dev — a pre and post sales tool for collaborating during the technical sales process in a much better way. My stretch goal for the year...