Founder Sales

"40 to 60% of B2B purchase processes end in no decision. If you scratch on that data, the majority of those aren't saying, 'Well, I'm not making a decision to buy something new because the old thing we were doing is better.'... the majority of those is they couldn't figure out how to make a choice confidently."

"If a customer is indecisive, throwing FOMO into the mix makes it worse. So they're less likely to close the deal if you throw that in. And the idea is that they're already stressed out and you're just putting more stress on them by pressuring them."

"Instead of trying to base the sales process on how we want to sell, we need to actually design the sales process on how they want to buy. And it seems like it's the same thing, but they're actually really, really different things."

"To be a great founder, you really need to be able to not have such a ossified view of your identity... you have to sell investors... candidates... customers."

"The Collison Install is what often happens with customers, is that they say, 'Yes, I want you buy your product.' And then they do not implement it, they just go quiet. There's no implementation and this is very bad if you're selling software to someone... they would just install Stripe into the customer's website... they basically would not go away until you finish the implementation of Stripe."

"I think if you find people that are really excited and you do line up customers, that is a great green light that it is time to do a startup, right? That can get you down the path... Build it once you have some conviction and then you're like, 'Oh, I think I would have a customer. I think that at least one person would use this thing I want to build.'"

"Shut the God damn laptop. Just don't open it and start with... 'We're here because we've been working with some people in your industry and we understand there's this really serious problem... and we believe that your company might have it, is that true?'"

"Your goal in that call is to get them to talk as much as possible and for you to take notes. And by the way, this is a place where you probably still want to remember to use a pen because you actually want them to see you writing down their words, because that means, 'Okay, he's listening.'"

"The problem is, which anyone who hasn't done sales before that joined YC, they realize this, is that if you take the average customer group in the world, 90% are not early adopters... Those 10 percents are the early adopters. They're The ones that you actually want to reach. But that means you have to reach 10 to find one."

"Founder led sales is really that first milestone that a startup goes through on the commercial side, which is, how do I go out and get my first few customers? ... the founder is the product."

"If you can focus the messaging in a way that speaks to something that has a bit of shock value, or is counterintuitive, you'll get them to continue reading. ... relevancy. I think that matters even more so than personalization right now."

"Before you buy any tool, don't even think about tools. ... Can you manually find 30 people that you want to spend 15 to 20 minutes writing a rock solid note to?"

"Founder led sales is not about revenue on day one. It is about learning as fast as humanly possible to get to that pulse, so that you can earn the right to sell."

"Get the second call booked on the first call. Pull up calendars. Look at calendars. Who else should be invited?"

"It's qualification. Qualification because if you spend your time on the wrong leads, that equates to a zero. ... it's never a bottom of funnel problem. It's always qualification."

"I don't use a tool. The thing about AI tools is they're all pulling from the same databases. I want to email someone not in the database that's getting hit by a million folks. I want to take a back door in, not the front door where everyone else is trick or treating."

"Sales. And this is the codification of a playbook. How are we having the conversation? How are we doing discovery? How are we handling objections? How are we doing demo? How are we moving to close?"

"If they're a real product manager and they're worried about value and viability, that is the founder's job. So the founder should be doing that and needs to be doing that, and it usually causes conflict if they bring in a real product manager too soon."

"The point is is that you can't outsource that behavior, the founder's got to do that stuff. A lot of people ask me that question, "Well, I suck at sales," or, "I'm afraid to talk to people," or, "Interfacing with non-friendly parties makes me uncomfortable." The way to think about it is... it's going to be way easier for you to get good, or minimally viable good, at selling by having interactions with non-friendly parties and having commercial conversations and asking for money in exchange for the value delivery."

"One, it's going to help you with your product development because you're not going to have that abstracted, for sure, two, you're going to be the person who's going to figure out how to talk about it in an effective way, and then three, it's going to make it such that you can package that up such that other human... Because that's the way that B2B startups scale... by adding more salespeople who then have customer-facing meetings with prospects."

"We ended up selling before we had a seller's team. We ended up, almost in some ways, always being behind, right? Okay, I'm closing contracts with people, I haven't hired my first salespersons... if you can't do it one time end to end, and you're the core, core group, the chances of just bringing somebody from the outside to solve that problem, it's wishful."

"My co-founder and I just basically got the contact of Scooter Braun... we literally went immediately to the airport. I just remember just basically going straight to the airport, flying to LA meeting with him... Intense urgency usually wins over thinking about it for a long time."

"Stop using email. Email is where deals go to die. Text message is where deals get done... I don't take the introer off the thread... It holds the person's feet to the fire to actually show up for the meeting."

"I personally work with Microsoft. So I have a little bit of insight in this. Here's what your employees think about you. Here's what Mark's approval rating looks like versus others, et cetera, et cetera.' This whole research report, I kind of broke out some highlights, a couple screenshots, attached the report and said, 'Hey, I'd love to discuss this with you sometime.'"

"My view is you start off with founder-led sales, the early team needs to know how to actually sell."

"I tend to gravitate towards the, 'I want to sell it before I build it,' because I really want the signal from customers and I want that to be the guide and the oxygen that drives what I'm building."

"Wait until you're around a million in ARR. When you have a repeatable process... as a founder you want to stay deeply connected to customers and get it to a scale and get it to a point where you use the word, there's some repeatability there."

"Excellent salespeople typically will talk well under half the time in a conversation because they're out asking questions, probing often helping a customer arrive at conclusions on their own. And so learning how to do five why's, go deep rather than immediately going into problem solving mode."