How I learned to talk to customers:

Joined the GTM (go-to-market) team at Vercel.

More devs that want to start a company should join a GTM team. Why?

You’ll need to lead sales as the founder at your company. Why not get some experience?

There are plenty of technical roles in GTM teams where your skills are very useful:
• sales engineer 
• solutions architect 
• customer success engineer 
• a bunch I’m missing 

Do this at a startup, not a BigCo. 

The sales playbook will be less defined, giving you room to iterate and learn sales, not just repeat a process. 

Pick a company in a market where you love the customers — for me that was JS devs. 

I spend all day trying to help devs enjoy work more & ship faster. 

Bonus points if you later want to serve the same customer at your own company. 

Do you NEED to do this? No. You could start your company and jump into the deep end. 

Joining a GTM team will show you if you like the other parts of the biz before incorporating. 

Learn to talk to customers