Selling Before Building: How I Got to Revenue Without Writing Code

In February 2025, I sent a cold LinkedIn message to a Director of Marketing at a 200-person identity verification company. In July 2025, they became Luminik's first paying customer. I wrote my first line of code somewhere in between.

This wasn't an accident. It was deliberate.

Why I Chose This Approach

I've built startups before. At Mainteny, I built the MVP first. Raised a $2.7M seed round. The usual path.

Here's what I learned: VC money doesn't solve the hard questions. How do I get customers? What channels work? What messaging resonates? Is there problem-awareness? What's our exact narrow ICP? Who could be early adopters? How do I open threads with them? How do I run a sales process?

Money doesn't answer any of that. Only selling does.

After Mainteny and my time at Bain, I didn't want to jump into the VC path again. During the early days of building SnowOptix, I approached VCs with the ego of a second-time founder. It wasted everyone's time. I was too early, and my founding setup wasn't optimal.

So with Luminik, I decided to do it differently. Sell first. Understand the customer deeply. Build only after I knew exactly what to build.

What Would Have Happened If I Built First

I would have wasted months without any incoming dollars. That creates stress. Startups are already hard enough—no paycheck, zero predictability in life. My wife has been incredibly supportive throughout, but I was at a stage where I needed cashflow. Selling felt like the right thing to do.

More importantly: I'm not an event marketing person. If I had built first, I would have imagined what customers need. That imagination would have been poor. I would have built the wrong product.

Selling first meant I got to see how event marketing actually works inside a real company. Not my assumptions. Their reality.

The First Conversation

I found my first customer through cold outreach on LinkedIn. I wrote to the Director of Marketing. We spoke 3-4 times over the following weeks before she came back and said they wanted to try working together.

Her exact words in the first response: "Each event has its own quirks, platforms to deal with etc. So more than automation, the important thing is how we handle that."

That's how buyers think. They know their world. They're not looking for someone to preach or teach—that's a classic sales mistake. They want someone who understands their reality and cares enough to solve it with them.

I didn't pitch automation. I didn't talk about AI. I demonstrated that I understood their problem and that I was willing to do whatever it took to help them solve it.

How I Delivered Value Without a Product

The first events were Dubai Fintech Summit and The Asian Banker Summit. No agreement. No payment. Just me proving I could help.

I became the glue between their GTM tools. I sat with their AEs, helped them run campaigns, wrote outreach copy. I uploaded and synced data across Apollo.io, Salesforce, and HubSpot manually. No integrations—I was the integration.

This was intentional. I didn't want to cause any disruption to their existing workflows. That's how you actually help: be easy to work with, don't create extra work for them, don't make them "manage" you.

I set up a dedicated Slack channel with the team—VP GTM, Head of Sales, Marketing Manager, and my champion. This gave me visibility into their work and outcomes. I created slides in Gamma.app and reported activities and results regularly.

Everything appeared as a service at this point. Not a product. And that was fine.

What I Learned by Being Inside Their Team

One month, they had five events. I was supporting multiple AEs simultaneously. It was hectic. I was stretched thin as the only person doing all of this.

But it taught me everything. I learned how a company like theirs actually runs GTM. I understood their ICP deeply. I treated their efforts as if they were my own—which made me spend more time writing outreach copy at the same quality and rigor as if I was writing for my own company.

I couldn't have learned this by building in isolation.

From Pilot to Paying Customer

When we signed the contract, my champion said: "We wouldn't have an event strategy without you, Prasad. Very happy to be continuing our collab."

That was one of the happiest days of my Luminik journey. It proved this approach actually worked. It wasn't just theory anymore.

When I Finally Started Building

I wrote my first code after 2-3 months of hands-on manual work.

By then, I knew exactly what to build. I had seen the repetitive tasks. I had felt the pain of being stretched thin. I knew which parts of the workflow were manual and tedious, and which parts required human judgment.

I couldn't afford to hire anyone. But given how much of the work was manual and repetitive, it felt natural that this was a real gap I should build software for. That's how you build a real business—you find the pain first, then you automate it.

The product is still being built. Running events involves many workflows. Most of the backend process is automated now, and I've been automating my own work to ease delivery. The customer-facing UI is still in progress.

This is both purposeful and forced. Forced because I'm a solo founder and I focused on sales and customer delivery for most of last year. Purposeful because I'd rather have paying customers telling me what to build than building based on imagination.

Why This Works for Technical Founders

Technical founders often default to building. It's comfortable. It's what we're good at. But comfort is dangerous when you're trying to find product-market fit.

Selling first forces you to confront reality. You learn what customers actually need—not what you think they need. You generate revenue while learning. You build relationships before you build software.

And when you finally do build, you build the right thing.

What's Next

I now have a pipeline I'm working on. I'm close to signing a deal with an 800-person AI search company. The approach remains the same: understand their world first, deliver value, then build.

The product will come. But the customers come first.

If you're a technical founder thinking about whether to build first or sell first, I'm happy to chat. No pitch—just sharing what I've learned. Reach out on LinkedIn.

Prasad Subrahmanya

Founder & CEO at Luminik. Previously built Aura at Bain ($3.6M ARR) and led Mainteny ($2.7M seed). Building an AI co-pilot for event marketing teams.