All start-up CEOs want a Partner network to help the Company establish market traction. The hope is your Company can leverage Partners to bring them into real sales opportunities. The reality is while in this early Customer Proof Stage, Partners will be less inclined and equipped to work with a new company until they see real…
Congratulations are in order when you reach this stage. As a CEO, you have closed your initial set of paying customers, you have identified and successfully sold the repeatable sale and you are probably somewhere around $20M in ARR. Now you are ready to raise the “market scale” round of financing and grow out your sales,…
Congratulations! You’re now approaching $10m in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). You most likely have at least 25 customers and are expecting some add-on sales or renewals this quarter. As mentioned in the last post, a critical indication of the future success of a Stage 1 company is the ability to move beyond beta customers to…
Who Should I Hire First? Many technical founders struggle to build out their initial sales team. Some of the questions they wrestle with during this initial growth stage were introduced in our last post, Why Don't I Have 100 Customers Already. They include: When should I start hiring salespeople? What does a "good" salesperson look like? How…
