When you’re pre-product market fit, sales is a job for the founders.

less than 1m read

·Nov 3, 2024

If you're the founder of an early stage startup and you're building a product that you're hoping other businesses will buy, you are capable of selling it. That's the good news. The bad news is that you're probably the only person capable of selling your product.

That is, if you aren't able to sell your product yourself at first, chances are you're not going to be able to hire somebody else to do it for you. Now, if you're anything like we were, you're probably thinking there are lots of talented salespeople out there. Wouldn't it be faster to hire one of them than try to do it ourselves?

After all, that's what you'd probably do with any other role, like designers or lawyers or accountants. The problem is that sales, before you find product-market fit, is very different from sales after you find product-market fit. Sales pre-PMF is fundamentally entrepreneurial; it requires vision and credibility with customers, lots of experimentation, and a tight feedback loop with the people building the product.

This is a role for founders.

Introduction to Grammar | Grammar | Khan Academy

Introduction to verb tense | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

View All

Helping Landlords Find Tenants – Sean Mitchell of Rezi

Why don’t we start with just a brief explanation of what Resi does and then go back to what you apply to? I see with so. Resi is where a rental marketplace with the mission to make renting better. We use our technology and we use finance in order to prov…

THE FED JUST HIKED RATES *AGAIN* | Major Changes Explained

What’s up, Graham? It’s guys here. So, you know the saying that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes? Well, that’s what many believe is beginning to happen as the Federal Reserve heads towards an event that we haven’t seen in almost 50 years…

Interesting example of Aliasing

Okay, I stuck a moment without the kids to do this for you. I’m going to show you a principle called aliasing. Aliasing is when your sample rate of your measuring device is not fast enough to actually catch the true frequency of what’s happening, so you c…

Sardine Feeding Frenzy | 50 Shades of Sharks

NARRATOR: What’s more thrilling than a shark? A mob of them. Sharks might have invented crowdsourcing. Every year between May and July, billions of migrating sardines come to spawn off the coast of South Africa, catering one of the largest feeding frenzie…

Introduction to ions | High school chemistry | Khan Academy

So my apologies. I just had a deviated septum surgery yesterday. But what we’re going to talk about in this video is the notion of an ion. So before we talk about ions, we’re just going to talk about the idea of an element. For example, if I have carbon,…

It Was Med School or the Circus | StarTalk

It just so happens we have on our video call. I think we’ve brought them in. We have someone who’s a tight RPP instructor, Sonia Harpstead. She teaches at the Circus Warehouse here in New York. Uh, Sonia, do we have you on the line? Yeah, I’m here. Oh …

When you’re pre-product market fit, sales is a job for the founders.

More Articles