When should you hire your first AE?

When to hire your first AE and how to do it

When I launched this newsletter my hope was that I’d be able to engage with the startup community of founders, early stage GTM execs and salespeople interested in joining startups to help work through some of the hardest problems related to scaling revenue at the seed stage and beyond.

I was really encouraged by the outpouring of support and feedback from folks who saw the launch announcement on Twitter or LinkedIn and offered to provide their thoughts. I was able to connect with Stan Rymkiewicz who runs GTM at early stage inbound automation startup Default. They are in the process of hiring their first AE after seeing dramatic growth in 2023 and he was kind enough to walk me through some of their main considerations in hiring for this role.

There were a few key considerations that Stan and Default’s founders Nico and Vic are prioritizing for this hire:

• They are looking for strong outbound experience and industry/persona experience

• They want someone with startup experience or early sales hire experience

• They are prioritizing someone who is resourceful and a self-starter

• They are looking in particular for candidates who started new initiatives at previous roles as an indication of resourcefulness and grit

I think this is a great high-level list of screening requirements for a first GTM hire. The reality is that this role is one of the hardest jobs in a startup. There is often no repeatable sales process (yet) and many early deals have been won by the sheer force of will of the founders. A successful founding AE will need to be able to do their best to replicate what the founding team has done to get to the first $x00k of ARR and then expand on that.

If you’re interested in considering the role at Default, reply to this email and I’ll connect you with Stan and the team. In future newsletters I’ll dig in more on how to source, screen for, hire and then coach and support these first GTM hires.

Three interesting articles

1. Getting scientific about early stage sales

Jyoti Bansal, serial enterprise software entrepreneur and investor, often has great advice for scaling early stage startups. This long form tweet is a good rundown of the need for technical founders to embrace sales, in particular the science of sales, early on.

Jyoti’s advice is to study the competition, learn sales and how to do it and rely on experts for help as advisors. All great pieces of advice!

2. Should you hire an AE as your first sales hire?

Another great tweet from angel investor and silicon valley operator Gokul Rajaram. His advice is to hire two SDRs to provide pipeline to founders vs hiring an AE as your first sales hire.

My response to this is “it depends.” I do think it makes sense to find ways for founders to get demos and SDRs represent a good path there. The challenge though is that SDRs require a lot of hands on training, management and ultimately upward mobility. A technical founder might not be able to devote the time needed to help those SDRs be successful booking meetings.

If you have a resource internally, like a Head of Growth, on your founding team than this could be a viable path. Otherwise, I would still default to hiring 1-2 full stack AEs to prospect, book meetings and sell alongside the founder responsible for sales.

3. The science of scaling from Mark Roberge

Mark Roberge was the first CRO at Hubspot and now runs Stage 2 Capital, a venture capital firm focused on helping their portfolio companies with early stage GTM. He put together a fantastic presentation at SXSW on how to scale early sales.

First GTM Hire Jobs

I’m going to be highlighting jobs that are explicitly advertised as “first sales” or “first GTM” hires. If you’re interested in highlighting a role like this at your startup, reply to this email with a link to the role and I’ll include it in the next newsletter!

• Antimetal is hiring for their first Account Executive. Antimetal helps companies optimize their AWS cloud spend and has raised a $4.3m seed in 2023.

• Lago just announced their $22m seed round today. They are hiring a founding AE at their HQ in Paris. They are building billing infrastructure used by top startups like Mistral and Together.

• Flex is hiring for a founding AE. They were just founded in 2023 and they are helping businesses accept HSA/FSA payments.

Closing thoughts

My plan for future newsletters is to start to walk through key aspects of early stage GTM including:

• Customer development and design partnerships at inception

• Getting from $0 - $10k MRR

• How to do demos/early sales presentations as a founder

• Running a sales process with mid-market and enterprise customers when you’re <$20k MRR

I have a lot of other topics in addition to these and if you have any ideas on future content areas, let me know!

Lastly, it’s been great to see the response to launching this newsletter. If you think one of your friends would be interested, feel free to send them here to sign up.