Selling Websites at 14, 100 Sales Calls a Day, and a Black Belt: My Path to Forward Deployed Engineering

I've spent this past year writing about Forward Deployed Engineering — what the role actually is, how to break into it, how to earn a customer's trust. All of it practical, all of it from the field.

This post is different. It's the answer to a question I get in almost every interview and most first calls with customers: how did you end up doing this?

The honest answer is that I was doing forward deployed work long before I knew the title existed. FDE isn't a job I applied for. It's the shape my career kept taking every time I followed the two things I can't help doing: building, and dealing directly with the person the build is for.

Twelve years old, first customer at fourteen

I started building websites at twelve. Not for a business reason — because I could, and because watching something you made show up in a browser is a drug with no known cure.

By fourteen I had customers. College students — six, seven years older than me — needed websites for their final-year projects, and I sold them websites. Looking back, the code was the easy part. The education was everything around the code:

A student would describe what they wanted, and what they said was never quite what they needed. Their real requirement was "make my evaluator impressed in a ten-minute demo." Once I understood that, I built different things.
They had deadlines that did not move. Submission day is submission day. You learn to scope to the date, not to your ambition.
They were paying with money that mattered to them. When someone hands a fourteen-year-old their pocket money, you feel the responsibility physically.

Understand what they actually want, ship by the date, respect the money. I've since run enterprise AI deployments with seven-figure stakes, and the job description has not fundamentally changed since I was fourteen.

Engineering, hackathons, and demo-day muscle

Engineering school gave me the fundamentals, but hackathons gave me the FDE reflexes. I won a lot of them, and the reason wasn't that I was the best pure coder in the room. It was that hackathons reward exactly what field work rewards:

Build the thing that demos, not the thing that's complete. Forty-eight hours forces brutal prioritization — the same instinct I later wrote about in building POCs that win deals. Judges, like buying committees, decide in minutes.

Pitch what you built. Half of every hackathon is standing in front of strangers and making them care. Engineers who can't explain their own work lose to engineers who can, holding worse code.

Team velocity beats individual brilliance. You learn quickly that unblocking a teammate is worth more than polishing your own corner.

The sales floor: 100 calls a day

Here's the part of my résumé that confuses engineers and delights every sales leader I've ever worked with: I did sales at WhiteHat Jr. Real sales. A hundred calls a day, fifteen conversions as the daily target.

That floor taught me two lessons I have carried into every deployment since.

Take responsibility — be the leader no matter what your role is. On a sales floor nobody cares about your title; the number is the number, and you own it. When I moved back into engineering, I kept that. If the deployment is stuck in the customer's security review, that's my problem. If the ops team isn't adopting the agent, that's my problem. FDEs don't get to say "not my department" — and honestly, after that floor, I lost the ability to say it anywhere.

Smile before every call, no matter the mood. It sounds like a poster on a wall until you've done call ninety-one of the day after ninety rejections, and someone picks up who deserves the same energy as call one. People depend on you showing up whole. Years later, joining a customer's war-room bridge at 2 a.m. with a production issue, it's the same discipline: your calm is part of the product.

Ôdasie: a French agency in Thailand, and the job finds its name

My first proper taste of the full FDE loop came at Ôdasie — a French-run agency operating out of Thailand, with me working remotely and leading a team of six. Agency work is forward deployed work: every project is someone else's business, someone else's constraints, someone else's definition of done.

That's where I shipped my first wave of production AI systems — LLM pipelines, voice agents, MCP servers, n8n orchestration for approval workflows — always for a client, never for a roadmap. Cross-cultural too: French stakeholders, Thai operations, an Indian engineer, and requirements traveling across all three. You learn to over-communicate, confirm in writing, and never assume a nod means yes.

VoiceQube: US clients, US hours, the whole stack

VoiceQube is where the role sharpened into what I now recognize as senior FDE work. US clients, which meant working their hours from India — being on their calls, in their standups, reachable when they were awake. Founders and operators I talked to directly, week after week, for years.

And the work spanned the entire stack, because in the field nobody hands you a neatly-scoped ticket:

Backend — NestJS systems serving real-time interactions across 40,000+ locations
Voice AI — LiveKit, Pipecat, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Claude, and the latency budgets that make or break them
DevOps — AWS end to end: Lambda, media pipelines, CloudFront, the works
Frontend and mobile — React and React Native apps the customer's users actually touched
Customer experience — demos, training, escalations, the trust-building that turns one project into three

That breadth isn't résumé decoration. It's the job. The customer has one throat to choke, and it's yours — so you'd better be able to fix whatever layer broke.

Staying current is part of the same obligation. Agents, MCP, new models, new tooling — I treat keeping up with this field the way athletes treat training. Customers are paying for the frontier; showing up with last year's playbook is a breach of contract.

The sports section, which is really the personality section

I played chess. I did taekwondo for ten years — black belt, competed at the national level. Hockey at the state level. I used to think of this as a separate life from engineering. It isn't.

Chess taught me to think in lines, not moves — what an architecture decision costs three steps from now.

Taekwondo taught me that mastery is boring: ten years of the same kicks, refined. A black belt is mostly proof you didn't quit. Deployments are won the same way — not in the kickoff meeting, but in week nine, when the integration is fighting you and you show up anyway.

Hockey taught me teams. You win nothing alone, and the players who lift the bench matter as much as the ones who score. I've been told my defining trait is pushing the people around me — being the motivator whether or not I'm the captain. That came from the field and the dojo long before it showed up in a performance review.

Communication, teamwork, discipline, leading without the title — every "soft skill" an FDE needs, sports installed in me before I wrote a line of professional code.

Your network is your net worth

The last thread: almost nothing good in my career came from a cold application. The agency work came through people. The US clients came through people. The lessons came from people generous enough to share them. I try to pay that forward — mentoring, writing this blog, answering the DM from the kid who's fourteen and selling his first website.

If you're early in your career and you take one thing from this post, take that. Skills compound, but so do relationships, and the second curve is steeper.

Why FDE, then

So: a kid who sold websites to college students, an engineer who won hackathons by understanding judges, a salesperson who learned to own the number and smile at call ninety-one, an agency lead who shipped AI systems across three cultures, a full-stack builder living in his customers' timezones, and an athlete who thinks in teams and refuses to quit.

There's exactly one job title that uses all of it at once. That's why I do this work — and why the rest of this series exists.

If any of it resonates, my inbox is open.