Chapter 1: The starting point
4 min read · 840 words ·
The first draft of this chapter was a list of things I'd built and why they were clever. Three paragraphs of positioning and not a single honest sentence. I deleted it.
Here's what's actually true.
What I do for a living
I'm a Client Director at Computacenter. Gaming and entertainment sector — iGaming, sports betting, esports, sports and entertainment. I've been in enterprise IT sales for over a decade. My clients include some of the biggest names in the industry and most of my day is spent helping them figure out what they need, why they need it, and how we're going to get it done.
I'm good at it. And like most people who've been good at one thing for long enough, I started wondering what it would look like if I built something of my own.
The gap I kept noticing
Sales is teachable. That's not a controversial statement, but it's one a lot of people treat as if it is.
The difference between a rep who can't close and one who consistently does isn't talent — it's a set of patterns, habits, and mental models that the second person has built up and the first hasn't. I've spent twelve years on the front line of enterprise sales. I've sat in procurement reviews, navigated buying committees, written proposals that ran to six figures and ones that didn't get past the first call. I know what works. More usefully, I know why it works.
What I didn't have was a way to share any of that.
Most sales content online is motivational. Tips, hacks, morning routines. The stuff that gets likes. The systematic, engineering-first approach — the kind of thinking that actually scales results — barely exists in a form that's easy to find or easy to use.
That's the gap Sales Source Code is built around.
What Sales Source Code actually is
Sales Source Code is an enterprise sales education brand. The name is deliberate. "Source code" because the plan is to make the underlying logic of good selling visible and reproducible — not inspirational content, not war stories, but the actual patterns that drive outcomes.
The format is content-led: LinkedIn posts, long-form pieces, eventually a course. The content is informed by twelve-plus years of actual enterprise sales — real deals, real mistakes, real wins.
It's not a consultancy. It's not a coaching programme. It's a content and education business built around a specific idea: that sales is a discipline, and disciplines can be documented and taught.
The honest starting point
No audience. No product. No list.
A LinkedIn profile with a few hundred connections, most of whom know me from my day job. About 4 to 7 hours a week to do anything with any of this. A day job that, genuinely, takes most of my energy — which is fine, because I like it, but it does set the ceiling.
What I did have was a system. Or the beginning of one.
I'd spent the better part of a year figuring out how to use AI to build and run a content operation without it consuming my weekends. The result is a ten-workflow automation system I call Zo.E — Zero-Overhead Engine. It handles content generation, review and approval (via Telegram, which is its own story), publishing, engagement tracking, and weekly analytics. The whole thing runs largely without me once it's going.
That system is now a product in its own right — you can buy the workflow templates on Gumroad. But the bigger play is the content business it's meant to power.
Why build in public
A few reasons, all of them honest.
First, I have no audience. Building in public is a way of building one — the process is the content, at least initially. People who might want to buy what I'm eventually selling are exactly the people who'd find the build interesting.
Second, it forces rigour. If I'm writing about what I'm doing and why, I have to be clear about what I'm doing and why. That's useful.
Third — and I'll admit this is the smallest reason but it's there — I want a record of it. If this works, the origin story matters. If it doesn't, I want to know exactly where it went wrong.
What's coming
The plan is to write eight chapters covering the build from scratch to first sale and beyond. This is Chapter 1. It covers the starting point — which is, to be direct about it: nothing much, a decent idea, and not a lot of time.
Chapter 2 is about building the content catalogue: what I decided to write about, how I'm structuring the content, and what the first batch of posts actually looked like.
The honest version of this series isn't a success story. It's a build log. Some of it will work. Some of it won't. I'll write both.
Ta,
James
Founder | Nunlimited
