Founder-led sales
The early, messy part nobody talks about
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You know you need to get out there and sell your product. You’re past the mistaken belief that your product will sell itself, or that product-led growth will work, or that you can hire someone who will figure out sales for you.
You’ve read a ton of (useful) guides that tell you how to sell your product. You’ve tried to implement what you’ve learned from SaaStr, YC, the Founding Sales book, etc.
But there’s something missing. All of these resources focus narrowly on how to sell your product — NOT how to use sales to figure out what you’re really selling… or how to use sales to find product-market fit.
As a result:
You’re struggling to get consistent results, despite following the “best practices”
Sales conversations often feel like you’re speaking a different language than your prospective customers
You’re having a difficult time onboarding customers and getting them successful (and customer retention is a scary topic)
You feel a level of existential product-market fit dread: Are we selling to the right people? Are we selling the right product? Why is this so hard? Are we uniquely stupid?
The startup world is missing something: An approach to early founder-led sales. One designed to help us figure out what we’re selling, before we think about scaling.
Here’s my contribution, after working with 50+ companies at this messy stage.
1. When should you start selling?
In short: As early as possible. Maybe do 10-20 customer interviews first to make sure you’re on the right planet, but start selling before you’re ready, before you even have something to sell!
Founders wait too long to sell, because you think you need to (1) have something to sell, and (2) know what exactly it is you’re selling - and to whom!
But there’s a weird paradox: You can only figure out these things by selling!
Not by interviews, experiments, research. You can only figure out what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to… by trying to sell it. And in the process of trying to sell, you’re going to figure out what buyers really want, which tells you what to build.
Too many founders go about this the other way:
Do a bunch of interviews, research, experiments
Build a MVP alongside some mystical fairy “design partners”
THEN go out and try to sell
This rarely works - you have to sell to learn what to build. It’s too error-prone otherwise.
Instead, the process is:
Go out and try to sell something
In the process of trying to sell it, you figure out what people really want to buy
This tells you generally what’s worth building
Build a “good enough” version very fast to deliver on early sales
Build the right version as you continue to sell & deliver
Anything else is trying to build from the “Ivory-tower down” versus from “reality up.” Go sell. Go sell now.
2. What is the goal of early founder-led sales?
Above, I wrote that founder-led sales is a way to figure out exactly what you’re selling, and to whom. That’s directionally true, but not precise enough.
The goal of early founder-led sales is to figure out a case study worth replicating. And to prove you’ve figured this out by replicating this case study a bunch of times. Why? Because that’s product-market fit!
Building a case study you can replicate, where the customer says “hell yes” pre- AND post-sale, is something only a founder can do… and until you have this, nothing else matters.
Here are all the things that DON’T matter for early founder-led sales:
Economics: Cost of customer acquisition (you’ll figure that out later), unit economics (don’t worry about margins yet), pricing (until you know what they’re buying, you can’t optimize pricing), revenue, growth rate, metrics, etc.
Scalability: Market size (total bullshit), how you’re getting your pipeline (don’t need scalable cold outbound / inbound), a sales process/playbook (don’t waste your time), how “good” your product is, your plans for the future, etc.
Until you build and replicate your “hell yes” case study, nothing else matters.
3. How do you approach early founder-led sales?
Here’s the crazy part:
The best way to figure out your replicable “hell yes” case study is by selling
And, the best way to do founder-led sales is to have a conversation with prospects about your (real or theoretical) case study. And see if they want to replicate that case study.
Seriously, that’s it. Early-stage founder-led sales is that simple. The hard part: Interpreting what you’re hearing from customers to unfold your business in the right direction. (More on this next week.)