Jason M. Lemkin says hire a strong VP of Sales before you hit $1M ARR, sometimes much earlier. He hired his first VP around $1M revenue and a VP of Marketing at just $20k/month. Early executives drive lead generation and professionalization instead of waiting for arbitrary milestones.
And by all means, you should do that. And I hired my VP of sales. My first one, around a million, and my second one, around a million also. It was a rough time. But what I learned is I've worked with 25 other startups since then. And I look back what I did, which was somewhat on accident, I hired my VP of marketing at 20k a month in revenue, so 240k in MRR. And she crushed it. She crushed it because even though we weren't at a million, she brought in more leads than I needed to cover her salary. Okay. She helped work with my sales team, she helped professionalize my company, she built our webinars, she built our collateral. And so what you'll find is, when you get to that million, everyone wants to hire a VP of sales. But the real answer is, do that. Try. Which we can chat about, but hire any great VP you can find. If you find the VP of Marketing, first, hire her. If you're overwhelming your engineering team, you find a VP of Engineering early, hire him. If you find the magical VP of Product that can help you build more software, more workflows, do that. Hire VP of Customer Success.
