Why I build and close — and why most software teams do only one
There are two cultures in software. One builds. One sells. They sit in different rooms, use different tools, and quietly blame each other when the numbers miss. For most of my career I was firmly on the selling side — and I spent a lot of that time wishing the builders understood what I was hearing from customers.
I spent 8+ years in enterprise B2B sales across SaaS, AI, industrial IoT, and construction technology. I carried a $5M+ Ontario territory and closed seven-figure public-sector deals through channel partnerships. What that taught me is that the gap between a product and a signed contract is almost never about features. It is about whether the person who built the thing ever sat across from the person paying for it.
When I co-founded Root Skills — AI-powered software for Ontario licensed childcare centres — I did not hand the selling to someone else. I build the roadmap with my co-founder Roza, a Registered Early Childhood Educator, and I am also the one walking into centres, demoing ELECT-aligned program plans, and hearing exactly which words make a supervisor lean in and which make them glaze over. Every one of those conversations goes straight back into the product. There is no translation layer to lose it in.
That conviction is the whole thesis behind Sunshine Growth, the growth-partnership division of Canada's Sunshine Inc. I work with a deliberately small number of founder-led companies who have deep domain expertise — in healthcare, finance, professional services — and I co-build their entire revenue system: the web platform, the SEO and generative-engine optimization, the AI-assisted content, and the outbound. Not a deck about growth. The actual machine. And because I carry shared upside rather than an agency retainer, I only win when the build actually closes.
The lesson I keep relearning is simple: the builder-closer is not a unicorn, it is a discipline. You do not need to be world-class at both. You need to refuse to let the two jobs live in separate rooms. Build the thing, then go sit across from the person who has to say yes. Then build again.
Written by Mansoor Haghighi. For partnership or media inquiries, the fastest channel is LinkedIn.