Short clip from a March 2025 discussion where Jason M. Lemkin advises founders to personally close their initial customers before hiring their first salesperson. He emphasizes that customers prefer speaking with the CEO and that founders are typically well-positioned to close the first ~10 customers even if they dislike sales.
So I think the question that Liz leads to is what is a sign that you should start to hire your first salesperson?
Even if you hate sales, even if you think it's icky, even if you don't like it, As a founder, you've 95 times out of 100, you've got to find a way at least to close the first 10 customers yourself. You've got to find a way and we could dig into how to do that if you don't like sales. That the hack though, is that even if you don't like sales, customers love to talk to the CEO. They, the customers love it. And here's the other thing. As a founder, you're really good at the product in the market, hopefully even in the early days. So what I mean, so what's important is even if you don't know how to do outbound, even if you don't know how to send a cold email, even if you don't do any of this stuff, and even if you don't know how to ask for a check, even if you don't know how to open or close, almost all founders are a plus middlers. A plus middlers. A plus middlers, right?
