How I learnt to position and sell Entitle Guard

I spent more than twenty years helping other people position and sell their products. When I started selling Entitle Guard, I assumed that experience would make it easy. It did not. Knowing the theory and living it turned out to be two very different things.

Too much wisdom

I started with a head full of marketing lines I had quoted in workshops for years. Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter inch drill bit. They want a quarter inch hole.” Rory Sutherland: “We don’t value things; we value their meaning.” And his reminder that “the human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.”

Every one of them is true. The problem was that they were all in my head at once. Each time I prepared a pitch I tried to honour all of them, while also explaining a platform for builders, trades, suppliers and homeowners. I was thinking like a consultant advising someone else, not a founder sitting across from a customer. It made my pitch more complicated, not less.

A hundred features

My early adopters were builders and developers referred to me by my network. That made the first conversations warm, and it also made them risky. Everyone was generous with ideas, and between them they asked for something like a hundred features.

As a startup I could not say yes to everything, and I could not afford to say no to everything either. Yes to all of it would have buried a small team. No to all of it would have sounded like I was not listening. I learnt to ask what problem sat under each request and to build the ones that kept coming back.

I also learnt from people who never became customers. Some replied once and went quiet. Some ignored me completely. Each silence told me something: the message was too long, the problem I described was not the one they felt, or I had reached the wrong person. All of it refined the pitch.

The first two customers

Our first customer came on board from December 2025. What made him right was not his size. He was willing to spend real time on the platform and tell me honestly what worked and what did not. Using it on live homes exposed what no demo does: a property corrected after submission, a buyer who changes, a certificate that belongs to the whole project rather than one home. I fixed what he found quickly, and I kept showing him a future. A first customer is not buying the product as it is. They are buying the belief that it will become what they need.

The second came through my network too. He had the same underlying problem but saw it from a different angle: support after the keys were handed over. For him the pain was the calls and defect claims that keep arriving for years. That pushed queries, routing to the right trade and our AI receptionist much higher up the list, and taught me that two customers with the same problem can buy for different reasons.

The pitch that failed

To go beyond my network, I engaged a professional sales agency to find builders and developers. They brought me five leads.

My first pitch was a disaster. I was all over the place. I tried to show everything in thirty minutes: the builder portal, trades, suppliers, the consumer app, compliance, the AI. Anxiety and the need to sell took over. I talked when I should have asked. The builder left knowing a lot about my software and nothing new about his own problem.

It was also the most useful call I made all year. I went back to basics and asked what I am actually good at. I am a consultant. I position, I ask questions, and I help people think about a problem until they see it clearly. I had done that for twenty years, and in my first real pitch I had dropped it to imitate a salesperson.

So I stopped trying to be someone else. I went into the next calls comfortable in my own skin, even in an industry I was still learning. I asked about their handovers, their warranty calls and their team before I showed a single screen. The next two calls went well, and both builders have since signed contracts.

Connect, then show

Later I presented to a group of mid size builders. This time I did not position everything. I talked about one thing: what a builder still owes after handover. The statutory warranties, the duty of care, the calls that come years later, the certificates nobody can find when they are needed.

The room did not need convincing. They knew the problem was real, and I knew it. Starting from that shared ground did more than any demo. It is how we reached our first critical number of builders: not through one clever pitch, but by learning from each mistake and carrying it into the next conversation.

What I would tell another founder

Choose first customers who will invest time with you, and keep showing them where you are going. Listen to every request, but build for the problem underneath it. Treat silence as feedback.

Most of all, sell the way you are. Levitt was right: builders want a handover that holds up and a phone that stops ringing, not a portal. Sutherland was right too: what they buy is the meaning, the confidence that their homes are documented and their name is protected. The wisdom was never wrong. I just had to stop reciting it and start living it, one conversation at a time.