Pete Kazanjy: commitment

Transcript context

…The way that I think about the book, Founding Sales, I like to think of it as the sequel to Eric Eric Ries's The Lean Startup or Steve Blank's Four Steps to the Epiphany or Startup Owner's Manual or whatever, where if you think about the stages, and this is all B2B, if you think about the stages that a product goes through, it's one, you've got to know what problem you're solving and validate that, and it's got to be real. It can't be like, "Oh, well, I thought I had this problem," it's got to be validated. That's customer development, that's customer research, and that's more of a product management function. And then there's building the minimum feature set in order to prove that maybe technology can fit to this problem and solve it. That's how we create value as technologists, is piecing together technology and code or bits and atoms and what have you in order to solve a problem that people have. But then the next step is like, "Cool. Now, I've got to get someone to pay for this and I've got to do that in a reliable fashion and I've got to do it in a scalable fashion," and so there's a little bit of a loop there. It's not like, "The product's done, throw it over the wall, have fun, kids." It's a loop, where the minimum viable version of your product is probably going to suck and then in order to get to the minimum valuable step, you've got to be interfacing with a lot of customers and that's a sales behavior, getting in front of people and being like, "Hey, I think you probably have this problem if you look like these other folks right here." The point is is that you can't outsource that behavior, the founder's got to do that stuff. A lot of people ask me that question, "Well, I suck at sales," or, "I'm afraid to talk to people," or, "Interfacing with non-friendly parties makes me uncomfortable." The way to think about it is, I forget who the person was who said, "Startups versus incumbents is a race between can innovation get to distribution before distribution can get to innovation?" So, this is a related concept where as a founder, it's going to be way easier for you to get good, or minimally viable good, at selling by having interactions with non-friendly parties and having commercial conversations and asking for money in exchange for the value delivery. It's going to be easier for you to do that than it is for some third party to become as expert at the subject matter that you're tackling that you are. Because as a founder, early on, use Atrium as an example, we make data-driven sales management software, which it exists to help sales managers and teams use metrics and data to improve the performance of their reps. The way I think about it is Datadog-y Amplitude-y, but for your sales reps. nt software, which it exists to help sales managers and teams use metrics and data to improve the performance of their reps. The way I think about it is Datadog-y Amplitude-y, but for your sales reps. I'm probably the expert in sales analytics in the world, and so back in 2016 and 2017 when we were doing this, put aside the fact that I already know how to do minimum viable selling, if I had tried to get somebody else expert at that in order for them to go out and do that in the market, that would have been not good. This is why Steve Blank always talks about startups can't get to scale without firing their first VP of sales, it's oftentimes because they skip that step, and so the founder's like, "Hey, man, I'm going to pour a little bit of sales on this, hire some sales leader or whatever, some sort of seller, and outsource this. " You really just can't do that, not for the first couple dozen customers, it's just not tenable. You lose that feedback loop, you lose the learnings of whether or not your message fits the market, all that sort of stuff. You're playing a game of telephone with that with a third party seller versus even you just want to keep that in one brain to start, then package it, and then when you have a repeatable while loop, a selling while loop, then package it and hand it to someone else. So, that's my diatribe on why founders have to do this. I was going to try to summarize the reasons that you should be doing this and it sounds like there's so many. One is figure out what you should actually be building, that's a reason founders should be selling, two is learn how to position and pitch and sell, three is figure out what you could teach your salesperson when you hire them. Is that a summary of why you should be selling as a founder for a while?…

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