Selling AI agents to paper-bound Balkan SMBs: how do you close non-tech traditional businesses?
Then-Occasion18 · reddit · 2026-11-01
A founder building vertical AI agents for paper-heavy SMB workflows in the Balkans asks for GTM advice: 70-80% of local traditional businesses (restaurants, clinics, service providers) still run on paper binders, Excel and phone calls. He's stuck on two questions: pre-selling feels impossible in a market where owners barely trust software, and whether a working demo is mandatory — or whether he should drop the word "AI" and just sell "saving 3 hours a day." He plans to own sales end-to-end and is looking for a B2B SaaS sales mentor or technical co-founder. The discussion offers a real-world window into selling AI automation to low-trust, low-digitization markets.
More from coding & agent
- Sentry CEO: a model-less coding harness likely can't be a viable business given compute costs — zeeg · 2026-11-01
- XState creator shares prompt: ask AI to find all implicit state machines in your app — DavidKPiano · 2026-11-01
- OpenPixel: An Open-Source MCP Toolkit for AI Agents to Create Pixel Art — Yasirovic · 2026-11-01
- Generative coding with Grok Bot: writing the full test loop into your prompt — NickPassig · 2026-11-01
- Nous Research's Hermes Agent adds Beam data-movement integration, powered by Bittensor — markjeffrey · 2026-11-01
- Model-refusal failover chains quietly lower your real safety floor — petrusenko_max · 2026-11-01