> the skill of shamelessly shilling ... all day long, everyday until you make it.
It's one of the most important comments in the thread.
Not only is it an acquired skill (selling), it's bonded to an extraordinarily valuable character trait: perseverance.
A lot of people can't do the necessary sales to drive their product/platform/service because they either can't absorb the hits from doors being constantly shut in their face (hearing no all day long, or worse), or they feel shame from pushing the thing on other people (most of whom do not care and don't want to hear it and do not want you wasting their time, and certainly initially that will all be true).
Promoting is selling. Selling is promoting.
The best sales people are shameless. Not in the sense that they're abusive, rather, in the sense that they'll push their offering to every corner of the globe as necessary, getting 99 no answers to get to that one yes answer. Being told no a thousand times feels very shameful, low and hurtful to most people and they can't handle it.
Promoting your thing, is always about selling. Shilling is nothing more than the task of selling being categorized as a disparaged craft.
This reply resonates so much with me. I think it takes years of experience to understand something like this (at least it took me a long time).
I too started from this thinking that promoting is shilling, but it's not. Every successful company in the world does it and there is absolutely nothing wrong with promoting your product or yourself as long as you're not breaking the rules.
I think it's the part of geek culture that misunderstands selling as shilling, which is probably the reason why so many good but small startups fail. They just don't sell enough.
It's the same ideology that charging for a product or service is bad somehow. I remember that a blog that reviewed a website of mine (a movie making software in 2007) was all gaga over the product but as soon as we went from free to paid, it put us in a special section called "website hall of shame". Just because we decided to charge something for a product which users were making money off.
I takes a lot of skill to sell, get rejected and hear 99 Nos for that single Yes and sometimes that's the only thing missing between a win and a loss.
