Welcome to First GTM Hire! The goal for this newsletter is to help early stage founders and their first GTM hires navigate the challenge of finding product market fit and the early motions needed for a repeatable sales process. We'll also be exploring the latest trends in tools, processes and tactics that are working for GTM teams in 2024 and beyond.

You can expect an email once a week on Friday mornings. That pace may increase over time, we’ll see!

As a founder after you raise that first $2-5 million seed round, the most important thing for you to do is find product market fit. Too often, B2B founding teams focus on building product first and perhaps talking to a handful of warm intro "customers" as design partners to determine if they are on the path to PMF. In my opinion, this is a recipe for disaster.

As a founder, a huge amount of time after raising that seed round should be devoted to methodically and quickly do customer development to validate the pain and willingness to pay for a product to solve that pain. Building should happen after that validation occurs and the validation and feedback should continue as you build your MVP.

After you start to bring on early customers and and get that first $30-40k MRR, it’s time to start to think about your first GTM hire. In my opinion, these hires are some of the unsung heroes of startups. They have to roll up their sleeves and figure out how to build out a repeatable, scalable process when most of the revenue to date has likely been generated by the founders.

My goal is to help demystify what it takes to find PMF and build this sustainable sales process to go from Seed to Series A and beyond.

Why do I care about this topic? I've personally been either the first GTM hire or founder responsible for sales four times. I've gone from $0 - >$18m ARR, helped develop product led sales motions and seen the difference between self-serve sales assist and driving six and seven figure enterprise deals first hand. I've also sat in both that first sales hire seat and the seat of the founder doing early sales. I'm excited to share some of my learnings to help other founders and early GTM hires avoid mistakes I've made and leverage learnings along the way.

In addition to sharing learnings across multiple companies over the past few years, I think we are in an interesting moment for B2B sales at any level of maturity as a business. Cold outbound tactics like spray and pray email campaigns that previously worked are no longer effective. B2B budgets are significantly constrained and there's a bias towards tech stack consolidation. It's harder to sell now as a newly funded Seed founder or as a growth stage salesperson than ever before. I plan to highlight new tools, tactics and strategies that are working for early stage founders and GTM teams.

If you're getting this email by surprise, it's likely because we've interacted over email in the past. Feel free to unsubscribe if this topic isn't interesting or relevant to you. If you think a founder or GTM friend of yours might be interested, feel free to forward it along so they can subscribe.

Lastly, I don't think there are enough resources or support for the first GTM hires at B2B startups so I'd love for this to become a community to connect founders and GTM hires who are going through the journey right now. If you're interested in talking to other people in your shoes, please fill out this quick survey.

1. Startup leaders share the GTM basics for technical founders to hit their first $1 million revenue

Megan Reynolds at Vertex Ventures wrote about a recent event they held where founders walked through their approaches to early stage GTM. There are a lot of good tidbits from that piece including the quote above. Sometimes that first GTM hire isn’t a salesperson, but comes from a non-traditional background.

2. Know if your idea’s the right one

First Round Capital put out a great resource on how to run effective customer discovery. This is something I believe most founders neglect to spend enough time on. The main takeaway of the piece was to segment customer discovery into three phases:

1. Form a research plan.

2. Learn without “leading the witness.”

3. Identify patterns in the analysis that inform product strategy

3. When To Hire Your First Sales Leader

Doug Regner, an operating partner at Unusual Ventures, had a nice post on his Substack about when to hire your first Head of Sales. His framework encapsulated in the image above centers on being able to do a few core activities via founder-led sales first.

My general rule of thumb is that ideally founders get to >$500k ARR and then hire at least two salespeople that can hit quota before hiring a sales leader.

I’ve already heard from a few of you who are interested in contributing to the newsletter or joining the community. If you’d like to join the upcoming community of founders doing founder-led sales and first GTM hires please fill this quick survey out.