Product-first drives more revenue
Early revenue ≠ PMF, Product-adoption AND revenue = PMF
In the creation of new categories and with the new wave of products being built, the need for traditional formal selling is probably not what you need to win customers. Many Founders and early-stage companies should seek ways for prospects and users to get value from their products before closing deals. This often leads to thrashing between the gaps in "Product" and "Sales.” From my experience working at amazing companies led by technical Founders, and with many of our clients today, product and technical outcomes must be the sole focus to generate future revenue, allowing sales reps to restructure deals based on true Product-Market Fit (with a capital P).
Great sellers want to come in, drive deals they know will close, based on product availability today, and sell vision for the product’s future with as few promises as possible. In the early days, especially in the world of AI Agents where “real” use cases are still being defined, you need to be product-minded.
What often happens is Founders find a few key customers (or maybe reach the first $1M+ in ARR) and then aim to hire an AE. I’ve even written quite a bit about when to hire an AE and how to interview for that role. Upon reflection, I believe that the first “sales” hire Founders should make is actually someone who can relieve you of technical constraints. Customers want to talk to Founders; they want to be sold by the person who created the company. If you can solve true product problems and make your product excellent, as the amazing engineer that you are, then you should find someone to complement you in scaling that process. You should continue to sell the product, learn how to sell the next large deals and test how much more Product work is required to go up-market.
As your technical GTM hire becomes successful and self-sufficient, you can then start hiring an Account Executive who is eager to deeply understand the product and serve as a strong counterpart to the technical hire. At this stage, you have built a great team—you’ve become a “front-line manager” of GTM and now you can focus on how to scale and execute effectively.
Early-stage companies need independent, creative thinkers who are obsessed with solving problems. The best hires want to solve problems and understand that they will be well compensated once they solve big problems, whether that’s now or in the future. The main issue I see with Account Executive hires is that most just want to make money and close deals (this is a great thing and you want salespeople to make a ton of money), but Founders are often caught by surprise when Account Executives aren’t proficient with the product and fall back into their traditional ways of “selling the way [I’ve] always sold.” It’s incredibly difficult to get this right, but what I recommend is finding ways to make your developer experience, customer experience, and product absolutely top-tier, so it becomes obvious for world-class Account Executives to want to join and collect paychecks by selling the value and true ROI of all the amazing things your product can do.