I went from living in a $5m Silicon Valley hacker house to selling pest control door to door.
Overview
In 2023, I went from living in a $5m hacker house in Silicon Valley to knocking on doors of $150k houses in the Midwest (the picture above is from Tucson AZ, where I trained) to sell $40/mo pest control and was told to fuck off thousands of times.
I can't complain though. I knew what I signed up for. And I knew that it was exactly what I wanted despite friends and family saying it was a bad idea. Despite the feeling of dread the very idea of sales gave me.
And it didn’t matter how much research I did or how well I drilled objection handling, pitches, etc. Knocking a door for the first time was deeply terrifying.
But 10 doors in, I made a sale. And 2 after that, another sale!
I sold for the entire 2023 season and on top of sales skills, learned some valuable lessons.
Here's what I learned
1: Unapologetically pursue your own interests, or you will be awkward (and miss out)
Flag the guy with headphones on the riding mower down and try to sell him. Kiss the girl. Ask the direct question. People are more comfortable (and more likely to respond positively) when your intentions are obvious and you are confident enough to go for it.
Am I saying to try even when it’s obviously futile? No. But that leads into our next lesson.
2: If you are a beginner, push to a hard no every time
There’s this thing we all do where we presuppose failure to justify not trying and avoid rejection or discomfort.
“All the girls here are mid/stuck up/have boyfriends.”
“Rich people won’t buy from me because I have tattoos.”
Etc.
Are there red flags you should watch out for in different social situations? Absolutely. But that is an intuition best earned through iteration and being around people ahead of you.
Even then, you’ll sometimes run into a high performer who has some clever tactic to consistently succeed in a situation that you thought was hopeless.
The guys I know who’ve sold 1,000+ pest control accounts in a season (absurd top 0.01% performers) all claim they can tell if someone will buy within seconds. But they had to earn that intuition with tens of thousands of failures (including trying many times when it seemed futile).
More often, presupposing failure is simply cope for our insecurities, which leads to the next point.
3: There is no better magnifying glass for your insecurities than sales
If deep down (or even not so deep) you believe that you’re hideous, inherently unlikeable, whatever, sales will bring those things to the surface. And they can easily sabotage you if you let them.
The real danger is in thinking things like “I can’t succeed because of [thing I can’t change] instead of “I can succeed if I do x, y, and z consistently.”
The best solution to this is to put the work in to succeed despite these thoughts. Success triumphs everything.
Also, without getting too into the weeds too much, if you have serious insecurities, you probably drew some incorrect conclusions about yourself at a young age based on very limited evidence, and deconstructing those would go a long way.
4: There is nothing more powerful than your identity
It’s very common in D2D to make a sale within 1-3 doors after you just made a sale.
But that’s not because the doors are connected in some way. It’s mainly because your whole demeanor and mindset shift after a sale and you are (at least temporarily) “a person who makes sales,” so you act consistently with that.
People buy from people who make sales. Women want men who get women. It’s entirely natural. And I'm not even speaking on social proof...It’s about your identity and the behaviors that come from that identity naturally.
I firmly believe that no level of forcefully implementing Robert Cialdini's persuasion principles can compete with the behaviors that flow naturally from a genuinely held identity.
But while selling a door makes a sale much more likely in the next few doors, the opposite is also true.
5: The last door has nothing to do with the next
Winning streaks are real. But so are losing streaks.
Success begets confidence which begets success. Failure begets doubt, which leads to more failure.
So when you keep getting rejected, it's easy to get into a downward spiral where "nobody wants to buy from me." And if you believe in that too strongly, it'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Some door to door salespeople will give up when this happens, sit on a curb, and say "This neighborhood sucks. They all hate me because x, y, z."
You have to adopt the right beliefs to get through those slumps.
- "The last door has nothing to do with the next."
- "It's me, not the neighborhood" (true most of the time)
- "There are always 2-3 'laydowns' per day. I just have to keep going."
Believing the last one will guarantee that as long as you keep trying all day in D2D, you will make decent money (even if you absolutely suck at sales).
6: There are always 2-3 "laydowns" per day (in D2D pest control) so just keep going
There's this hilarious story in the book Models by Mark Manson (dating book) where he has this friend who repeatedly uses the pickup line "Can I pee in your butt?" And of course 90% of the time, the girls are horrified, but 10% think it's hilarious, like his confidence, and hook up with him.
Obviously this is not an optimal strategy. But it shows that no matter how inept you are, running enough numbers will eventually yield results.
Knock enough doors and eventually, you will find someone who badly needs your service then and there. They will not put up much resistance. They'll have 1 or 2 questions and be ready to sign up. That's it.
And sometimes finding one of those laydowns is all you need to shore up your confidence and start off a winning streak.
7: Sales as a career is not for everyone (but everyone should at least try sales)
As much as people hate to admit this (in sales, sports, any competitive endeavor), it is absolutely true that some people will be able to put in 1/5th the work training and kick ass.
Charlie Munger dropped his pursuit of mathematics at UMich because he realized this. It wasn't cope or an inferiority complex he needed to get over (untangling those things can be difficult). No. He was being put to shame by his classmates. And for him, it was clearly the right decision to drop it.
Sure, we all love the underdog stories and the champion who comes from the most unlikely circumstances, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule. Nice playthings for marketers to hawk courses and self improvement books.
History is littered with masses of unnamed people who believed just as strongly as x, y, z magnate or superstar that they were destined for greatness. It requires self awareness to make the most of your lot for 99% of people.
So I didn't get into sales expecting to be the best. Or to make shitloads of money. I got into it because a sales stint was the shortest path to a passing grade in an essential skill I previously scored an F in (at least essential for the things I want to achieve).
I can't even say how many times previously I'd talked myself into getting worse deals than people were explicitly trying to give me (to say nothing of actually asking for more). Talking my first consulting client into paying me 20% less. Missing out on a $100k check and relationship with a literal billionaire investor that was more a show of gratitude than an investment. Passing on a $40/hr dev job offer in high school because I thought they overestimated my ability. I could name 100 other things.
The practice of simply asking for what you want (and believing you deserve it) is extremely powerful. But many of us (myself included) need to experience a lot of pain before we decide to learn it. Sales is a great avenue for that.
8: D2D sales will test your pain tolerance (but you also need to have experienced pain to make it)
The vast majority of D2D salespeople quit within the first month. Few make it to the end of the season (runs April-September). I've noticed that people who've experienced a good amount of pain seem to last the longest.
Parents divorced traumatically. Used to be addicted to hard drugs. Whatever.
It's not a glamorous job. It's very low status–which can wear on you over time. But it also means that it's accessible to anyone and so it can be a great vehicle for someone to turn their life around.
Anyway, whether it's pain or simply a motivation to excel, there needs to be some kind of reason to get through all the self doubt and failure.
It's not abnormal to be rejected a hundred times per day. Add to this that it's face-to-face, people will call the cops on you for no good reason, it's seen as bottom-of-the-ladder, etc. and you really need a lot of pain tolerance to make it through for months.
But if you make it through, you will come out even more pain tolerant, which is useful in literally everything.
9: Autists can (and should) sell.
I've been told many times that I'm a little "on the spectrum." This has never come as a surprise. I've never had an intuitive grasp of people.
Regardless, I sold pretty well. And the top seller on my team was a hell of a lot more autistic than me (actually diagnosed).
The autistic systemizing impulse / capability can be very useful in terms of training consistently, hitting your numbers, developing an understanding of sales, etc.
A little autism is the secret sauce of Silicon Valley. And every one of those autists would be way more effective if they did a stint in sales.
Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable. – Naval Ravikant