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.

Planet or Plastic? | Explorer's Fest

Photoperiodism | Plant Biology | Khan Academy

View All

Generalizabilty of survey results example | Study design | AP Statistics | Khan Academy

First-year students at a certain large university are required to live on campus in one of the 24 available residence halls. After their first year, students have the option to live away from campus, but many choose to continue living in the residence hal…

Become Who You're Afraid To Be | The Philosophy of Carl Jung

Most people are afraid to fully be themselves. They’re afraid to embrace the parts of themselves that might be regarded as unacceptable because embracing these unacceptable parts makes them feel uncomfortable. So, to escape this uncomfortableness, they di…

Worked example: Lewis diagram of the cyanide ion (CN⁻) | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

In this video, we’re going to try to get more practice constructing Lewis diagrams, and we’re going to try to do that for a cyanide anion. So, this is interesting; this is the first time we’re constructing a Lewis diagram for an ion. So, pause this video …

Center of mass equation | Impacts and linear momentum | Physics | Khan Academy

So let’s say you wanted to know where the center of mass was between this 2-kilogram mass and the 6-kilogram mass. Now, they’re separated by 10 centimeters, so it’s somewhere in between them, and we know it’s going to be closer to the larger mass because …

The Worst Place to Change a Tire | Continent 7: Antarctica

The Ross Ice Shelf team is at a dead stop in a growing storm, 100 miles from help. You out, you in the middle of nowhere; no one’s really been here before. Your life is in danger if you go outside and hang around in there too long. Rob has to change a fla…

Podcasts have gone too far..

Can guess how many podcasts there are in the world? I listen to two. Too many, that’s what it is. Too many? Yes, everyone has a podcast! K: True. There’s 3.2 million podcasts in case anyone is wondering. What? No, no way! Yeah, 3.2 million podcasts. I …

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

More Articles