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.

Differentiability and continuity | Derivatives introduction | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

Properties perserved after rigid transformations

View All

Judging outliers in a dataset | Summarizing quantitative data | AP Statistics | Khan Academy

We have a list of 15 numbers here, and what I want to do is think about the outliers. To help us with that, let’s actually visualize the distribution of actual numbers. So let us do that. Here on a number line, I have all the numbers from one to 19. Let’…

Read What You Love Until You Love to Read

Before we go and talk about accountability and leverage and judgment, you’ve got a few tweets further down the line that I would put in the category of continuous learning. They’re essentially: there is no skill called business. Avoid business magazines …

The Housing Market Just Went ABSURD

What’s up, guys? It’s Graham here! So, as I’m sure you’re all aware, the housing market is absolutely bonkers. It was just revealed that housing prices have hit yet another record all-time high, rising 17% year-over-year. Buyers are paying a million doll…

Worked example: problem involving definite integral (algebraic) | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

We are told the population of a town grows at a rate of ( e^{1.2t} - 2t ) people per year, where ( t ) is the number of years. At ( t = 2 ) years, the town has fifteen hundred people. So first, they ask us approximately by how many people does the popula…

Index Fund Bubble in 2022? Michael Burry vs Warren Buffett

Index funds: A passive investor’s dream. Make one investment but own the whole market. There’s no doubt that index funds and ETFs are a very clever invention. It’s the easy way to be diversified across the whole market and back stocks as an asset class, a…

Fractions in context

In this video, we’re going to think about how fractions can be used to represent things in the real world. So, here we’re told that on the sharks dive team, there are three divers. In third grade, there are eight total divers on the team. What fraction of…

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

More Articles