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.

Current due to closing a switch: worked example | DC Circuits | AP Physics 1 | Khan Academy

Parallelogram rule for vector addition | Vectors | Precalculus | Khan Academy

View All

How To Make Galinstan

Let’s make some Gallon Stan. Unlike Mercury, Gallon Stan is not toxic, and it’s a liquid at room temperature. Unlike Gallium, which is solid up until about 30 Celsius, you have to hold this for a while before it starts getting drippy. No, no, no, you dese…

Writing inequalities to represent real-world problems | Grade 8 (TX) | Khan Academy

We’re told at the beginning of summer the city pool advertises a special offer. Swimmers can pay an initial fee of $20, and then the daily admission will be $4 per day. Without the special offer, the standard price is $8 per day. Irene wants to know after…

How the Kushites Took Over Egypt | Flooded Tombs of the Nile

[tense music] Nuri is one of the most intensive concentrations of pyramids anywhere in the world, across any culture and civilization. [upbeat music] In Sudan, in fact, there are more pyramids than in Egypt. And this is something that people don’t think …

Why Metals Spontaneously Fuse Together In Space

Shall I put this down? Yeah, of course. Ahhh, alright, we’re about to do some welding. Go on. Here on Earth, if you want to get two metals to fuse, you have to heat them up past their melting point. But in space, it’s a different story, as we found out t…

Changes in equilibrium price and quantity when supply and demand change | Khan Academy

What we’re going to do in this video is think about all of the different ways that a supply curve or demand curve can shift. That’s why we actually have eight versions of the exact same diagram. Each of them is showing where we are right now, let’s say in…

Worked example: Lewis diagram of formaldehyde (CH₂O) | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

What we’re going to do in this video is get a little bit more practice constructing Lewis diagrams. In particular, we’re going to try to construct the Lewis diagram for formaldehyde. Formaldehyde has one carbon, two hydrogens, and an oxygen, CH₂O. So pau…

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

More Articles