How to Sell Before You Build with Patrick Zelaya

In this episode of the Predictable Revenue Podcast, we spoke with Patrick Zelaya, founder of HeavyConnect, about one of the cleanest early traction stories we’ve heard.

He didn’t start with code. Or funding. Or even a finished product.

He pitched a room full of farmers with nothing but a pain point, and walked out with 15 checks and two years of runway. No VC. No sales team. Just real demand.

If you’re an early-stage founder trying to get your first customers, this episode is your playbook. It’s a case study in how to:

Sell before you build.
Listen your way to product-market fit.
And build something real enough that referrals do the selling for you.

Founders often look for innovation.

However, early traction usually comes from elimination, cutting out the painful aspects that nobody talks about because they have become too accustomed to them.

In agriculture, that pain was paperwork: compliance logs filled out by hand, then smeared, lost, or turned in late. The tools meant to help? Built for office workers, not people in fields with gloves, no signal, and no time.

But here’s the broader insight: When the work happens far from HQ, the workflow is often broken, and no one’s fixing it. If your users live in the gap between what management assumes and what’s actually happening, you’ve found leverage.

Don’t start with “AI for agriculture.” Start with, “How can I make this clipboard obsolete?”

“If You Don’t Show Your Work, You Get No Credit”

In regulated industries, doing the work isn’t enough. You have to prove you did it.

That’s the insight most founders miss. Operators on the frontlines often are doing the right things, but they’re stuck proving it with messy, manual systems. Compliance becomes a risk not because of bad behavior, but because of bad documentation.

This is where real opportunity lies: if you can turn invisible work into visible proof, you’re not just building software. You’re de-risking the business.

For HeavyConnect, that meant replacing muddy paper with a dead-simple mobile app. For your market, it might be replacing spreadsheets, voicemails, or screenshots. The medium doesn’t matter. The value is in surfacing what’s already being done, so your users finally get credit for it.

Sell the Problem Before You Build the Product

Most founders over-engineer their v1. The smart ones don’t start with software. They start with a room full of people who feel the pain, and ask them to pay to fix it.

Before HeavyConnect had a platform, it had a pitch: “Give us $6K. Tell us what you need. We’ll build it. But we can sell it to others.”

It wasn’t a beta launch. It was an offline Kickstarter, delivered to a Farm Bureau board, not investors. The result? 15 companies signed on. That covered two years of development. No product. No funding. Just problem-market fit.

The takeaway: Don’t validate with conversations. Validate with contracts. If the pain is real, people will fund the fix.

Focus Is Saying No. Over and Over

The fastest way to kill early traction? Say yes to every “what if.”

HeavyConnect heard it all: biometric scans, geo-fencing, satellite integrations, robotics. Cool ideas. Terrible timing.

Why? Because software doesn’t train people, it reflects them. And early users don’t need magic. They need clarity.

Instead of chasing complexity, they made the app work like paper, just better: big buttons, no typing, built in the user’s language, literally. It wasn’t flashy, but it worked.

The lesson: Don’t confuse innovation with invention. If your users can’t adopt it today, it’s not a feature. It’s friction.

Say no to the roadmap that wins a pitch. Say yes to the one that actually gets used.

PMF Doesn’t Shout. It Stops Asking Questions.

Most founders look for product-market fit as if it were a finish line. It’s not. It’s a shift. A moment when the energy changes, not in your team, but in your users.

For HeavyConnect, there was no viral spike or waitlist explosion. What changed was the tone of the conversations:

Prospects stopped asking, “Can it also do…?”
And started saying, “This already solves what we need.”
Intros came in faster. Explaining got easier. Sales calls became quieter. Less persuasion, more logistics.

But here’s the real tell:

Investors and mentors saw PMF before the founder did. That’s common. When you’re building in the trenches, progress feels incremental. However, the outside world begins to react differently. They’re surprised at how “together” you seem. That’s a clue.

And maybe the biggest signal? You stop improvising. You start repeating. You’re not chasing new use cases. You’re executing the same one, over and over, with growing confidence.

PMF isn’t a celebration. It’s a subtle tilt in gravity. The pull starts working in your favor.

When the Product Works, People Talk

HeavyConnect never hired a sales team. No SDRs. No paid marketing. Just a product that solved a painful problem, and users who told others.

That’s not magic. That’s focus.

When you build a product for a real job that needs to get done, and it actually does, referrals happen naturally. In HeavyConnect’s case, farm managers pulled in other teams. Contractors referred growers. Customers expanded across countries before the company even touched those markets.

You don’t scale referrals. You earn them.

Trying to force growth before you’ve earned that kind of pull is a trap. Most founders jump to hiring when what they really need is resonance: a tight wedge, a specific use case, and a product that delivers so clearly it sells itself.

Start there. Then ask yourself: “Would anyone recommend this without me asking?” If the answer is yes, you’re ready to scale. If not, you’ve still got work to do.