From choosing a startup idea to the transition of founder sales to team-led sales
From choosing a startup idea to the transition of founder sales to team-led sales
learnings from Graphite and WorkOS
At the Engineering Summit in San Francisco, I saw the CEOs of Graphite and WorkOS talk to a room full of founders.
With WorkOS, you get ready to sell to enterprise customers. It makes the biggest impact when a startup is post-PMF and generally starting to scale. If you're going through this breakout phase, try it.
With Graphite, you ship faster and never have to wait for a code review again. They have a cool state-of-the-code report.
Choosing a startup idea and getting your first customers
The earliest mistake in GTM, especially for engineer founders, is the belief that you must build it to sell it. The first five sales of Graphite were all slides, and not one person asked to click through the product. Also, the contract will take months to close anyway; you can build during that time. It also allows you to discover what is essential for customers—this feature is on the roadmap; if you pay extra, we can move it up vs build something you don't know if customers want.
As a founder, you will spend more time with your customers than your friends. Pick the startup idea that has the customers you like to hang out with the most. Pick an idea that is personal to you and that you are interested in vs what the latest VC or analyst report says you should build. This personal interest will help you get your first users and fuel the sheer force of will - to send emails, show up at events, and hustle the hell out of it.
Look at what communities you're part of. Graphite built a tool similar to Facebook's internal tools, and they started talking with alumni communities first. Leverage your community to get the first users.
Messaging - the art of talking about your product with other people
The more you talk about your product, the better you get at it. No founder is born to be great at this. Three-pointers to help hone your narrative:
Who are we talking with? In developer tools, you often sell two different products. The product narrative you tell to an individual contributor is different than the narrative for a CTO.
Start with what: What have I built for the world? The next step is to speak about how you built it, but people must ask themselves why this is better. Ask why until you find bedrock—something durable over time, beyond a single ship or feature, etc.
The narrative converges over time; the dots connect, but you must work on it regularly. Founders with a beautiful, crisp narrative did the work repeatedly till it converged; there is no magic.
VC frameworks can mess up your company
In venture, a ton of operators will opine on your company, might be a former "operator" VC or the portfolio support staff of a VC - they will rush to "help" with their favorite framework published in their favorite blog to market themselves. The ugly truth is that most of the time, their advice is useless or actually harmful because they do not have the intuition of your customers - they do not spend so many waking hours talking with your customers; you do. Thinking the learnings of these "operators" will translate to your company is the source of all mistakes. Reflect of a time when you listened to your VC, their portfolio support, or their expert friends, and you were so off; why? Likely because you were listening to "experts" instead of being curious and introspective - the best thing you can do is to speak with customers and listen to your intuition.
Unlocking the GTM motion - people love buying from the CEO
I am still waiting to meet a founder who did not f-up the early GTM motion. It's hard because you're doing something no one has done before.
The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) framework is useful only later. At the beginning, you have to meet with a lot of folks and see what resonates; it's like starting a band and figuring out what music will be on your first album when you haven't even played together yet. You just have to play and see what comes out.
You will not stop selling and hand it over to someone else. People love buying from the CEO. Don't look for people to hire in GTM to pass selling to them; look for people to augment you. You are like an athlete; to perform at the top of their game, an athlete needs a trainer, a nutritionist, a dietician, a sports therapist, and so on. Hire someone to help take notes or help build a pipeline for you.
Hiring the first GTM people is hard; expect it to not work from the get go. The best you can do is hire people who sold the same ACV as you and people who got parachuted to a company before where there was no playbook or support material, and they built it from scratch. But even if you hire someone like that, you still have a 50% chance of succeeding. You have to learn to hire/fire/motivate as a CEO and this GTM hire is no different.
Being a founder is hard; it's like being a standup comic and telling the same joke repeatedly. There are secrets about repeating your standup comedy act, but you won't find them in VC frameworks; you'll find them being curious, trusting your intuition, and speaking with customers. If you are going through a phase from thinking what idea to work on, all the way to hiring your first GTM hires, and want to see data points for any of these phases, don’t hesitate to reach out. I am a data hoarder and happy to share.