Sooner or later, in the mind of every entrepreneur, the obsessive question of how to sell arises. Wondering how to sell is critical, because without sales, there is no product, no value, no contribution to society. The downside of obsessing over sales, just like with money, is that it causes people to lose focus, and sooner or later, they end up ruining what they once built.

In the Anthropocene era, asking yourself how to sell is too basic and clumsy a question, especially considering that the real question is how to make your product sell itself. How do I make my product attract people? How do I ensure I don't spend my life trying to make people drawn to what I have to offer? How do I prevent my team from having to make fools of themselves on social media so we can sell?

The problem with the traditional sales dynamic is that it traps us in a super-toxic loop, where we have to be constantly validating our value to that client. The person who buys from you because you had to validate that you're an appropriate product for them is rare. I'm not saying it can't be successful, but it's such a different relationship from the truly magical one.

Nothing in life beats the connection you generate with a customer who came to you. A client who calls you because their lifelong best friend told them that your product, your person, is what they need in their life. From then on, the bond formed in the client-product relationship changes dramatically.

The traditional response to “how do we get a product to sell itself” involves million-dollar budgets for advertising, influencers, and campaigns that follow you across the web, hoping that after a lot of investment, something happens. The non-traditional answer requires another path, a bit more rigorous and slow, but it is THE path that secures this lottery I'm talking about.

The Essence of Not Selling

Products are no longer inert objects, waiting to be promoted. Rather, they are systems that, as a whole, build a world around the user. Well, this too has implications for marketing. If design is about how something works, marketing requires asking why we will talk about this. What element of the product will make me talk, tell my friend, take a photo, or something?

Gastronomic businesses have understood the importance of embedding "marketing" characteristics into their product that make us “share” what we eat. That's why some dishes are designed for that: tables are lit a certain way, “selfie” corners are included, or extremely photogenic spaces are created. The problem is it's never that simple or obvious. It's evident that this has led to all restaurants copy-pasting the same strategy, which almost always fails because more important than the photo is the quality of the food/drink/service. When the product isn't enough to compete, then we compete on price.

I don't know about you, but I believe one should never compete on price. You are not people who compete on price.

We said that creating a product in the 21st century requires focusing on emotions and sensations. We said that everything can be a product, including ourselves, and now we say that this product should be designed to sell itself. How? By ensuring part of the DNA of our product is something worth telling, sharing, recommending.

In our restaurant, perhaps as important as the beauty of the dishes is that the staff attending us has a service-oriented and resolute personality. Or maybe, the owner who serves you is a legendary aunt with all the style in the world, and you just want to take photos with her. The possibilities are endless, not always obvious.

It's important to know that everyone can have their 5 minutes of fame, or their moment of hype, when investing in advertising. The truly important part, yes, happens 5 minutes after surpassing all that.

A Growth Loop

“Growth managers” or growth hackers focus on exploiting and exploring something traditional marketing ignores: the product itself should be the main vehicle for growth. Growing can't be a department; it's the essence of what we do because if we're delivering what we committed to, there's no reason in the universe why we shouldn't organically have more clients.

Of course, they took this orchestration to Machiavellian levels.

Maybe you already know these examples, but Netflix didn't grow because it had the best shows. It grew because its recommendation and segmentation algorithms made every user want to watch “one more episode.” The product created its own controlled addiction. Another simple one:  Dropbox didn't need millions in advertising because the product incentivized sharing. Each user became an evangelist simply by inviting friends to store their stuff there, gaining more storage in the process.

The modern growth hacking methodology — responsible for this type of aspect — is based on three pillars:

• Analyze all the data: every interaction provides information. A single data point doesn't hold much value, but patterns and trends reveal the bigger picture.

• Constant experimentation: the product is like a living laboratory, and we are very permitted to fail, but we must do it as soon as possible, wasting the minimum resources.

• Intelligent automation: our system must learn and improve on its own. Anything that can be automated without degrading the user experience must be automated.

When a venture capital fund evaluates a product, it doesn't only look at the numbers. It seeks evidence that the product can grow organically. The key concept is its “product-market fit”: that magical moment where the product meets a need so perfectly that users can't live without it. Their lifestyle has been transformed.

After analyzing successful cases and multimillion-dollar failures, clear patterns emerge indicating what a product must have to create a successful growth loop.

Built-in virality. I'm not talking about share buttons (WHICH ARE BASIC). I mean mechanisms where the product improves the more people use it. WhatsApp is useless if you're the only user. With a billion, it's indispensable. WhatsApp organically compelled us to tell our friends: INSTALL THIS THING SO WE DON'T PAY FOR SMS.

Intelligent personalization: Systems that learn from interactions and adapt significantly increase engagement. But it must be subtle. No one wants to feel that an algorithm knows them too well. If we're talking about you, as a person, this translates into, for instance, allowing, listening, and processing “negative feedback.” Learning to improve, there's nothing better than knowing your worst data to be able to improve.

Transparency as an advantage. In an era of distrust, showing how your processes/algorithms work can be a differentiator. Transparency became part of the product.

Sustainability: No greenwashing. Genuine design for a world with limited resources. Sustainability sometimes means knowing that if you pay poorly, your business will never take off, because it means you're assigning great responsibilities to people who aren't equipped.

Balancing growth with ethics, personalization with privacy, engagement with well-being is not easy. The products that succeed don’t try to maximize one metric at the expense of everything else. They understand that in the Anthropocene, where every business decision has implications, developing systems that allow something to sell organically is pure survival.

The Present

The convergence of artificial intelligence, behavioral analysis, and human-centered design is creating products that anticipate needs before we articulate them. But that great power comes with great responsibility.

Consumers will gradually stop buying products and start acquiring worldviews, value systems, lifestyles. The product will just be a vehicle. Therefore, brands that try to sell you something without offering anything are doomed. The best marketing requires thinking and creating something so valuable, so perfectly aligned with people's real needs that it becomes indispensable.

In a world saturated with noise where everyone is clamoring for attention, the products that speak without words are the ones that truly stand out, and the funniest thing is, you're not even aware.