The founder who plans to fail ninety-nine times
Thirty-eight products, one exit, and a system for failing on purpose.
Sukhpal Saini taught himself to code as a teenager moving back and forth between India and Canada, turned a viral side project into his first tech job, and spent the next decade building in public. He has shipped thirty-eight products, sold one of them, and today he runs Carousel Studio, an AI tool inside Canva that is the number one trending app on the Canva marketplace, backed by Canva’s own Innovation Fund, and used by roughly a quarter of a million people.
Here are the five ideas I keep coming back to from our conversation
1. Every builder has to become a seller.
Sukh taught himself to code as a kid, and the lesson that changed his trajectory was that code was only half of the job. “You actually can’t put all your eggs in that technology bucket,” he says. “A builder plus a seller is actually the magical combo.” He treats charisma as a skill to train, not a personality you are born with. He took an improv class at Second City and has listened to comedy podcasts for over a decade to “surround yourself with funny people” until it rubs off, because “you just can’t be funny on your own.” His bottom line: “everything is sales,” and “sales skills actually work everywhere.”
Try this: Pick the one sales muscle you avoid, a cold message, a live demo, a price conversation, and do it ten times this week, on purpose.
From Sukh: “If you do work on that, the value that you get throughout your life is way higher than if you were just like a tech person.”
2. Sell as if the product is not yours.
The reason selling feels brutal, Sukh says, is that founders sell as founders. “Most of the time when people have this problem of, I’m doing sales calls and nothing’s working and I feel awful, is because they’re a founder that’s selling. That’s not the right framing.” His fix is a small act of detachment. “The framing should be, I’m just a seller. I don’t control the product, I don’t care about the product. I’ve just been given the product and I just need to sell.” Once the product is no longer you, a no is just a no. “If you detach that, then anybody that’s saying no to you doesn’t hit you.” He pairs it with sheer volume: a seller does “150 to get to the one” and turns off the part of the brain that flinches.
Try this: Before your next round of outreach, write at the top of the page: I am the seller, not the founder. Then send the messages as if the product belonged to someone else.
Detachment is the whole trick. A no aimed at someone else’s product cannot reach you.
3. Decide whether you are B2C or B2B before you build.
One mistake cost Sukh years: selling a twenty-dollar-a-month consumer product as if it were an enterprise deal. “I was getting 20 bucks a month customers, but I was doing sales calls with all of them,” he says, which is “a big no-no.” Consumer and business are “two different lanes completely,” and “you need to know that from the get-go.” Consumer runs on volume and channels like TikTok and SEO. Business runs on sales calls and case studies, because “there’s only two things that businesses buy: something that makes them more money, something that saves them more time.” The price, the channel, and the math all change depending on the lane, so pick it before you design the product.
Try this: Write your price next to your customer. If it is under fifty dollars a month, you are in the volume game, so stop booking sales calls and build a channel that scales without you.
4. Build in public to widen the surface area of your luck.
Sukh is not from MIT and does not have wealthy parents. He calls himself “an immigrant, just hustling,” and his edge is one anyone can copy: he builds in public. “Everything that I’ve gotten is by building in public,” he says, because it keeps “increasing the surface area of your luck.” A personal brand is “something that’s under your control” and “an unfair advantage.” It compounds, too. Last year a person he had met once sent him an angel check after hearing him on a podcast, and every public failure makes the next attempt start higher, because “everybody sees your story.” Writing the lessons down even clears space for new ones: ideas are “like a cup of coffee,” and putting them out “makes more room in the cup.”
Try this: Pick one thing you are working on and post the honest version of where it stands this week, including what is not working. Then do it again next week.
5. Start a hundred things, and one of them works.
Sukh has built thirty-eight products. Most made no money, and he wrote the postmortems to prove it. What changed everything was the math underneath the failure. “If people say one out of a hundred things might work,” he says, then “that means I just got to start a hundred things, because I know the hundredth one will work.” Each failure speeds you up rather than slowing you down, because “the more failures that you’re adding on top, the faster you’re getting to that one that will work.” He is honest that it takes a useful kind of self-deception. “Every single founder that does this is delusional. You kind of have to go in with, I know it’s going to work, I just know it.”
Try this: Stop grading your current idea as pass or fail. Number it instead. Whatever you are on, your only job is to ship the next one and write down what it taught you.
You will always take something away, even if it is only the thing that did not work. The one way to get nothing is to not start.
P.S. What number are you on right now, the first attempt or the thirty-eighth, and what did the last one teach you? Hit reply, I read every response.
Get to know me
I’m Dar Patel, an ICF-certified executive coach (PCC), I have worked with founders and executives, and am the writer behind The Inner Game, the weekly newsletter of Little Pursuits.
My goal is to support founders, executives, and individuals doing one of the hardest things we can do: build and scale something from the ground up.
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