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.

THE END OF $0 REAL ESTATE | Major Changes Explained

Describing numerical relationships with polynomial identities | Algebra 2 | Khan Academy

View All

Meet The Real Estate Investor who RETIRED at 25 Years Old (Self Made)

To get there, there’s only three things you can do: you can spend less, you can earn more, you can maximize your returns. And in that word, like spending less, yeah, is this way more impactful because it allows you to save more, yeah, and it requires you …

The scale of formality | Style | Grammar

Hello Grimarians! Hello Rosie! Hi David! So, we’re going to be talking about what we call the spectrum of formality today, in the context of language style. Balancing your style between formal and informal language when it’s appropriate is just a general…

Tesla: The Electric Revolution

This decade is set to be the Roaring Twenties of the electric car. Right now, electric cars make up only a tiny fraction of the automobiles sold worldwide, but according to a recent analysis, this is going to change pretty quickly. The same report suggest…

WHAT ARE INVESTING MISTAKES YOU NEED TO AVOID? | Meet Kevin PT III

When you buy an asset that’s illiquid, like real estate, sometimes that is its diverse in the sense it’s a different asset class. But it does not provide for liquidity in times of stress. You need to understand where there’s risk. You can’t value every as…

Private vs first class.

If you had the choice between flying private or flying first class, which would you choose? Private, 100% of the time. Flexibility, security, safety, quality of life, time. You can leave when you want to go, what airport you want to go to and from. It’s …

Multivariable chain rule intuition

So, in the last video, I introduced this multi-variable chain rule, and here, I want to explain a loose intuition for why it’s true, why you would expect something like this to happen. The way you think about an expression like this, you have this multiv…

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

More Articles