Some notes on type-1 and type-2 selling
Are you limiting downsides or expanding upsides?
Good enough to last forever
Whatever you do, you must sell. Whatever you build, you must promote.
Too many founders think marketing and promoting is beneath them. It’s not. In fact, if we consider two very hypothetical companies, one with the best marketing in the world and an average product, and one with the best product in the world and average marketing, the former would win every day. As long as you don’t offer something truly mediocre, there’s room for you until passionate competitors show up, and you may already have become rich by then. Even mediocrity can go a long way with good distribution, especially in B2C, think not-even-cheap junk food. Same with B2B, with mediocre but functional software tackling essential workflows.
This is something I learned selling accounting software: when you are dealing with critical processes, stakeholders just want things not to blow up; they don’t really care if it’s actually good or innovative. They usually go for the ugliest, most expensive software, that properly completes the 10% of tasks that insure against blow-up risks, like a zealous pear-shaped fifty-year tax auditor with acne living with his mom, or a sudden shutdown of your shiny neo-bank, because it turns out their compliance was not effectively enforcing anti-money laundering laws.
This is why, when you go deeper into critical processes, you’ll see more and more very old programming languages, 80’s UI, and obscure multi-million dollar companies that have been good enough at just one or two things. That’s Pareto optimization at its core.
Type 1 and Type 2 selling
Now, what the hell are type-1 and type-2 selling?1 Before explaining, know it’s unrelated to any future diabetes problems you’ve ignored by not cutting sugar.
In one word, it’s the whole conflict between necessary and critical, but non-sufficient, and great to have, but non-critical. It’s the difference between your heart, without which you cannot live, and your appendicitis, a single kidney or, let’s say, your eyebrows.
Type 1 - Capping the downsides first
Some sales processes are much more about de-risking the deal than pitching the upside. That’s what I face daily selling accounting software and services. I’m not talking to people dreaming about automation and innovation. I’m talking to people who want to cap the downside first—“Is your shiny software compliant?” only then “Will it make me gain some time?”
It’s not “Look at all the automation!”
It’s “Relax, the tax agency won’t come knocking if you use this.”
And, by the way, it automates stuff too.
No one cares about your slick AI-agents when the intern screws up tax calculus, and our pear-shaped tax auditor detects discrepancies between what they think you owe and what you actually paid.
Type 2 - Pitching the upside
On the other hand, some solutions require education—and explanation of why someone would need your software or service. Like when Cabify tries to sell me a corporate taxi plan. My team works remotely -because it’s 2025- and does their errands walking under the sun, like old Greeks. Cabify has no room in my process.
Typically, in B2C, you’re talking to someone in their leisure time—they want to feel something, enjoy something. In B2B, you’re in their productive time. They don’t want upside; they want to avoid downside. That’s the emotional payoff: nothing breaks.
In practice
In practice, type-1 and type-2 selling change the scope of priorities. Type-1 is more prone to vanishing leads and potential clients leaving the process out of laziness. Type-2 is more prone to churn and chasing shinier competencies, often attracted by one additional feature or something slightly cheaper.
This is why, in B2B -where solutions tend to be stickier- speed and ease of onboarding have a non-linear effect. The demo and the onboarding should ideally be the same thing. Because the moment they get even a modicum of skin-in-the-game, their incentive to leave drops. B2C on the contrary is almost churn-prone by design.
Type-1 B2B (where you're solving something critical but annoying) makes efficient demoing and onboarding essential. They have a hundred reasons not to talk to you again, so you better make your first shot count. Usually, in type-1 selling, once you lose the lead, you’ve lost them for at least a few months. In type-2, you can almost come back at them every day. Hence why consumer brands use and abuse aggressive, almost harassing marketing strategies2.
"Reduce to one" is a genius Steve Jobs design principle that applies not just to physical objects but also to workflows. A common critical mistake in type-1 selling is splitting marketing, demo, and onboarding into separate silos. In reality, the more they overlap, the better your chances of closing the deal. Marketing, demo, onboarding, all of it should feel like one step. Treat the sales process like a product. Good product marketing reduces the entire sequence to one, just like the iPhone did with a single button. This applies to all kinds of sales strategies, but it is especially important in type-1, where clients typically prefer to stick with the status quo.
Multiple steps actually create boredom and friction. A common mistake in B2B sales is insisting on a call before showing the product, even when the client clearly doesn’t want one. Terrible idea, if you ask me. It signals the product isn’t standalone -it can’t speak for itself without some annoying sales rep narrating over it. This is something I personally struggle with. Accounting software is a digital mastodon, complex, heavy, and rarely intuitive enough for a client to just pick it up and train themselves. But still, the goal should be: reduce steps, reduce friction, reduce human dependency to demonstrating and onboarding.
Type-1 should market themselves as type-2, and vice-versa
A good marketing and sales strategy makes a Type-1 prouct feel like a Type-2 product, and a Type-2 product feel like a Type-1 product. The goal is to move each in the opposite direction, because that’s where real differentiation happens. This is especially tricky with Type-1 tools. You need a slight tension between marketing and sales.
You must market it as different, to catch attention. But you sell it by first acknowledging exactly what makes you just like the old-school competitors, reliable, compliant, boring in the best way.
Let’s take two examples on opposite ends of the spectrum. On one side, you have the eggs and milk provider in B2C. On the other, a fitness app. The first operates in a “affordable and good enough” market. The second, in a “it better be worth it” market.
“Good enough” type-1 is sticky, especially in B2B.
Your competitors have to dramatically outperform you to get clients to switch. That’s why industries like accounting are so defensible: low churn, high CAC. But the flip side is obvious—onboarding is slow, risky, and painful. Change isn’t an opportunity; it’s a threat.
Now contrast that with high-churn, high-growth categories. These are markets where switching is easy, habits are loose, and attention is cheap but scale is fast. Dating apps, productivity tools, social media schedulers. These aren’t defensible by nature. They grow fast by staying top of mind, always pitching upside, and playing on novelty.
The interesting part is what happens when companies cross the line between the two:
Type-1 selling like Type-2:
A traditional, "boring" tool -say, accounting software- markets itself with speed, design, and vision. It leads with upside (automation, insights, dashboards) even though the core pitch is stability and compliance. This creates interest and differentiation, even if the sale ultimately rests on de-risking. Think: “You’ll automate 80% of your work” -but what really avoids losing the deal is “You’ll suffer no downsides, and enjoy some upsides”. It’s basic game-theory.
Type-2 selling like Type-1:
A “nice-to-have” tool -say, an AI-based marketing assistant AI- starts claiming it’s mission-critical. It builds credibility by tying into core processes (revenue growth, customer success) and positions itself as required infrastructure. It anchors its message in pain avoidance, not gain creation. Think: “If your outreach breaks, your funnel dies.” Suddenly, it’s not optional anymore.
The type-0, high CAC, high churn
Now, technologies like APIs, fast onboarding, and AI have created a new category: products that are critical in function but have zero defensibility.
This is where VCs often get fooled. These tools look indispensable—core to the business stack—but they’re easily replaceable, with no real moat. They thrive on subsidized growth, especially in consumer-driven or thin-margin markets, where price wars drive margins to zero. And yet, despite being critical, they require costly marketing and relentless sales effort to stay afloat.
It’s a paradox: the product is essential, but the business model is fragile. What makes them grow fast is also what keeps them bleeding.
Let’s call it Type-0: high CAC, high churn. These are markets where everything looks great on the surface -critical systems, huge TAM, rapid early growth- but under the hood, they’re structurally unstable. Payments for small businesses, delivery applications, neo-banking for consumers. Why? Because these markets attract massive venture funding, and with it come subsidized pricing and onboarding, aggressive incentives, and short-term client loyalty. Everyone's fighting for a foothold, and no one is really sticky.
This is where VCs often get fooled: the same variables that drive early growth—speed, hype, incentives—also fuel volatility and churn. What builds the business also quietly destroys its foundations. These platforms are easy to scale but hard to retain. The growth curve masks the fact that product defensibility is weak, and differentiation is mostly marketing spend. Type-0 is a paradox: it looks like infrastructure but behaves like consumer churnware.
I’m the proud, sole owner of this bright naming.
Movistar, Tigo, Claro : Go fuck yourself, I want no discounts on whatever garbage offer you have for me. Thanks.