Everyone Loves to Give Advice, No One Wants To Buy

This single line captures the brutal reality every founder faces when starting out.

1. First, you ask for “advice” to get into conversations

2. Then, you transition from “asking for advice” to “selling”

3. Finally, to scale pipeline, you must enable others to sell “your” product too

Phase one - asking for advice on a problem space - often feels easy.

People love helping founders. It makes them feel important. Your calendar fills up easily, and introductions flow like water.

But many get carried away and start pitching their solution instead of exploring the problem space.

This can be fatal.

Why? Because once people know your solution, they stop telling the truth. Nobody wants to crush a founder's dreams. It's easier to smile and nod.

NEVER reveal what you’re building until the last five minutes of a discovery call.

Here’s a real example:

Santiago, the CEO and co-founder of Momentum - whom I had this discussion with - initially wasted months on false signals.

He'd start calls with

"I'm building AI to analyze sales calls."

Everyone said it sounded amazing. Nobody bought.

Then, he pivoted to opening calls with

"Tell me, do you have any problems with identifying patterns from your customer calls?"

Now, he'd spend 25 minutes purely on discovery. What tools do they use? Where does the process break? How much time does it waste? What's the business impact?

No bias. No hints. Just questions.

Only in the final 5 minutes would he reveal:

"Well, we're building something that might help with that."

The results? Night and day. Without knowing your solution, people complain about real problems—or admit when something isn't actually painful.

Phase two starts once you have paying customers.

Now, the “advice game” ends.

You can't pretend to seek feedback when you're clearly selling. The moment you switch from "I'd love your thoughts" to "Let me show you our product," everything changes.

You're no longer the scrappy founder everyone roots for. You're a vendor asking for budget.

The result: Meeting booking rates plummet to 3-5% - if you’re lucky - and introductions mostly stop.

This Valley of Death kills many startups. They can't shift from advice-seeker to seller. They can't handle the rejection spike. They don't scale outreach to compensate.

The solution?

Simple - if response rates drop 10x, increase outreach 20x.

Enter phase three - build real pipeline generation. Create systems. Accept that you're now running a sales organization, not just having friendly chats. Eventually hire SDRs.

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Enjoyed reading this?

Check out my conversation on the focal podcast with Santiago Suarez Ordoñez, Co-Founder and CEO of Momentum, who spent 15 years as a successful engineering leader before deliberately building for sales teams - a market he knew nothing about. He went from "never sold anything" to building a thriving AI sales company in a short time period and has many lessons to share that especially fellow technical founders need to hear.

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