A celebrated Hacker News comment distilled sales into 7 simple rules, including 'people buy 4 things only: time, money, sex, and approval' and 'sell aspirin, not vitamins.'
Where this was said
At 0:07 · chapter starts 0:00
The episode opens with Shaan Puri making a bold claim: he's found the highest-value comment in Hacker News history. Written by an anonymous 20-year sales leader in response to an engineer's plea for sales help, the comment distills the entire discipline into 7 deceptively simple rules. Sales is like golf — stop overcomplicating it and just hit the ball. People only ever buy four things: time, money, sex, and approval/peace of mind. Sell aspirin (urgent pain relief) not vitamins (nice-to-have). All things being equal, people buy from friends — so go make friends. Be useful, send interesting posts, write birthday cards, introduce people, and expect nothing in return. Do it consistently and money will come to you. And finally: nobody cares about your quota or burn rate — there are $100 trillion in the economy waiting for you. [1] — Shaan Puri "A Hacker News commenter with 20 years of sales leadership compressed the entire discipline into 7 rules. People only buy four things — time…" 00:07 Sam listens, nodding along, before mentioning he's rereading Cialdini's Influence and noting, in a Buddhist proverb that gets a laugh, that you are never the same reader twice.
A Hacker News commenter with 20 years of sales leadership compressed the entire discipline into 7 rules. People only buy four things — time, money, sex, and approval. Sell aspirin, not vitamins. Make friends. Be useful. Expect nothing. There's $100 trillion in the economy waiting for you.
According to the Hacker News commenter, every purchase boils down to time, money, sex, or approval/peace of mind — selling anything else leads to failure.
Sam Parr negotiated a $14,000 motorcycle price from $18,000 by bringing the seller a Coke. Shaan tried the same trick at a school principal meeting — the principal refused the Diet Coke, and the program got shut down anyway. The rule of reciprocity is real, but execution matters.
Sam built Algrow from zero to $14,000 in monthly revenue within just six months of shipping his first MVP.
Algrow reached over 10,000 users in roughly six months, driven almost entirely by organic Discord community growth.
Sam acquired his first 400 users entirely through Discord communities, without paid advertising or traditional outreach.
Algrow added exactly 480 new paying customers in its most recent month, demonstrating strong ongoing growth.
Sam's Stripe dashboard showed over £10,000 in revenue in the last four weeks, equivalent to roughly $13,000–$14,000 USD.
Sam gave all early users free access so they could show the tool to friends, turning them into live demos and advocates who helped the product spread virally.
By silently screen-sharing his tool in Discord voice chats rather than posting links, Sam attracted curiosity without violating no-self-promo server rules.
Before building Algrow, Sam and two friends made over $10,000 in revenue through affiliate marketing for RizzApp by posting faceless texting story content.
Daily content drives traffic to a waitlist landing page; those email subscribers become your first 100 customers because they already trust you and want to solve the pain you address.
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