I Stopped Pitching. Replies Tripled.

For the first few days of talking to people about Ryva, I was doing what felt natural. I had a product, I believed in it, so I explained it. Every DM I sent was basically a mini landing page. Here’s the problem. Here’s how Ryva solves it. Here’s what makes it different.

Silence. Mostly silence.

Not rejection. Just nothing. People read it and moved on.

Then something small shifted the way I thought about this entirely.

I was in a Reddit thread about standups. Someone wrote a long comment about how their team ran things. I almost replied with the usual explanation. Then I stopped and just asked a question instead.

“When your team wants to quickly understand what’s happening in a project, where do they usually look first?”

They replied within an hour. A long reply. Detailed. They explained their whole workflow, what worked, what broke down, where context got lost. More than I had ever gotten from any DM I’d sent before.

That’s when I noticed the pattern. Replies only came when I asked about their workflow. Not when I explained mine.

So I kept asking. And what I found split into two groups.

The first group had already solved it. They built automations in Notion, or wired up Jira, or kept a daily Slack thread. They were proud of their systems and happy to explain them. And the more they explained, the more the gaps became visible. The Jira tickets weren’t being updated. The Slack threads got buried after a week. The automations only tracked one tool, not the full picture.

They thought they had solved the problem. They had solved part of it.

The second group hadn’t solved anything. These were the people watching a 15-minute standup drag to 45 minutes. The engineering managers who described their morning as “archaeology” because they had to dig through commits, PRs, and three Slack threads just to understand what changed overnight. One person called their standup “a forensics exercise.” Another said their updates were “theater for stakeholders” and that real blockers were handled separately, invisible to leadership.

None of these people needed convincing. They were already living the problem. The only thing I had to do was ask the right question and then stop talking.

Here is what I learned about the difference between pitching and asking.

When you pitch, you’re transferring information. When you ask, you’re discovering shared reality. The first one makes people feel like a target. The second one makes them feel like a collaborator.

There’s also something else. When someone explains their own workflow to you, they often diagnose their own problem mid-sentence. You don’t have to tell them something is broken. They arrive there themselves. And a conclusion someone reaches on their own is a hundred times more convincing than one you handed them.

A COO who helps agencies scale past $100k MRR reached out after seeing one of my posts. I didn’t pitch him. I asked how his team tracks project state. He told me. Then he asked me to tell him more about Ryva.

That’s the order it should go.

I’m still early. Ryva is in its first weeks of real user conversations. I have a small waitlist, a few testers, and a lot of threads still going. But the shift from explaining to asking changed everything about the quality of those conversations.

The lesson, if I had to compress it into something useful for other founders:

Your product isn’t the most interesting thing in the conversation. Their problem is. Ask about that first. If what you’re building actually solves it, they’ll pull the answer out of you. You won’t have to push it.

Stop trying to convince people. Start trying to understand them. The right users will convince themselves.