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.

2015 AP Chemistry free response 2 d e

MTV News Rocks the Vote | Generation X

View All

Is Glass a Liquid?

In 1994, a massive earthquake shook the Northridge suburb of Los Angeles, killing 57 people and injuring over 5000. The cost of damages was in excess of $20 billion. It’s earthquakes like this one that make us question just how solid is the earth beneath …

Can Cell Phones Help Save Rain Forests? This Tribe Thinks So | Short Film Showcase

So we take an old cellphone and we put it up in the trees. If it has solar panels, it can last for years. It listens to all the sounds of the forest all the time to pick up the sound of chainsaws and logging trucks, anything that indicates there’s danger.…

Regrouping with decimals

We are told to fill in the table with whole numbers to make ten point seven four in two different ways. So, pause this video and see if you can figure that out. So, we really need to fill out what would be what would you put in here for this to be a repr…

Do Cell Phones Cause Brain Tumors?

Do cellphones cause brain cancer? Yeah, if you’re on them a lot, yes, it can’t be good for you. I did decide to stop, you know, putting the phone whilst I’m driving in my groin, inside my movie and over there, in case it’s gonna cause testicular cancer. …

TIL: Wild Lions Live in India | Today I Learned

[Music] Most people think about lions in Africa, but very few people know that they actually exist in India too. It looks, uh, not very different from the African lion. It is, however, a bit smaller. It does have flappy skin on the stomach that looks diff…

Valley of the Boom: Trailer #1 | National Geographic

That little A and At? See, that’s what I said. Mm-hm. Um, Katie said she thought it was “about.” Yeah. Oh. MAN: But I’d never heard it. KATIE COURIC: Or around or about. MAN: I’d never heard it said. I’d always seen the mark but never heard it said. Y…

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

More Articles