Jason Lemkin: prediction

Transcript context

…When you talk about being honest, what you need to be honest about is that you need sales help to close customers? Be honest about that. Just be honest about, yes, the motion that it will take to get those first 10, 15, 20 customers, and if they were able to find you by putting their credit card and no one had to talk to them, then that's your DNA today. It doesn't mean you won't go up market later like a Slack or a Canva, but if you can get them all to do that and you never have to talk to them, then get really good at viral loops, get really good at almost B2C type motions, get really good at this kind of stuff and hire growth hackers and do the whole almost B2C-ish motion, which we have at self-serve, but if your first 10 customers come in and say, "You know what, Lenny, I'll pay you $5,000, but you've got to solve this problem I have with online video," that is not a self-serve motion. It is not a self-serve motion. Even worse, sometimes worse is your first 10 customers, five of them sign up online, but it takes a huge amount of effort for 19 bucks a month, and then five say they'll pay you $5,000 a month. Some founders are like, "I'm going to work on the five that pay us 20 bucks a month, not the five that'll pay us $5,000 a year." I find too many folks that don't like sales, too many folks that have not had any life experience in a sales-led environment flee from those customers, and I've never seen that lead to success. We're surprised who our niche is sometimes. We talk about nailing our niche, but sometimes we're surprised that niche that finds us. There's a lot of startups I've invested in that start off product-led growth and quickly realized, "This just isn't working," and many of them move to, "We need to actually hire salespeople and start to go top down."…

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