A SaaS founder at $600K ARR asks Jason M. Lemkin the order to hire executives. Lemkin says hire VP of Marketing first, then VP of Sales once you have two reps hitting quota, then VP of Product. Grab 10x talent whenever you find it, even if timing feels off.
I run a cold email SaaS. So we're at about 600K ARR. I'm a one-person shop now. My CTO quit last year.
Sam Altman said you could go to a billion. Why would you hire anybody if you got to 600K yourself?
Yeah, but my question is what to do first, VP product, VP marketing, or VP sales? VP marketing. Okay.
Okay. But having, I'm going to tell you exactly why it's a good question. I think it's helpful to other people. I'm pretty certain of my answer. Having said all of that, I might've said this earlier in this event. I'm not, maybe I didn't say this earlier in that, but I've said it many times.
It's probably one of the 10 best things I've ever said on SaaS because it takes you years to figure it out.
Yes, the right sequence is VP marketing, VP sales, VP of product. I'll tell you why. I've got some great SaaS posts on it. We made a cool chart that people have stolen and reused without attribution hundreds of times. AI just makes that so much easier. That's the reason I'll tell you why, but The real answer, if you have something like you have, hire any great VP you can ever find, but great, not good, not because you're tired, not because you need to do sales or you need to do marketing, you do product, we'll get there. But if literally you're here and you meet this and you're too early for a VP of sales, or you don't really need a VP of product today and you meet someone and you just know this person is 100 times better than ever you met. Find the money, take it out of your own pocket as a founder, find them. So there is a sequence and I, there's a perfect sequence if you're capital constrained for your VPs, and I will say that second, but ignore all of it. If you find a 10 or if you have a logarithmic scale of 5, if you find a 5, I don't care if you have no money. If you ever find a 10x engineer, a 5, hire her, hire her because she will build that feature, that integration, that thing that, that Google wants or Oracle wants. And she will pay for herself in about 8 weeks at 10X. If you've never worked with a 10X engineer, you don't know what I'm talking about. If you have, you know that they're all accretive. They're all accretive for the ICs and the best VPs are accretive. So if you truly find them and in your heart of soul, you want to get married, that they are the one for you, the one, hire them too early or in the wrong order. Okay. So that, and trust me, having said all that in a perfect world, if we had unlimited candidates, No problem sourcing them. We had a surplus of A players. Everything was easy. Probably don't want to hire a VP of sales until you have 2 reps hitting quota. We've written about this because 99% of VPs of sales get you from rep 3 to 300. They take a process that is starting to repeat, that has order, and the output of that order is 2 reps hitting quota. When you have 2 reps hitting quota, even if it's chaotic, even if it's founder-led, you actually have the beginning of a process. A smart VP of sales will figure out what those 2 do. And then bring in a third or fourth in the first 30 days and you're off to the races.
