Founder-Led Sales

You have an MVP. Now you need customers. Your instinct is to run ads, hire a marketing consultant, or build a "growth engine." Don't. In the early days, founder-led sales is the most important thing you can do.

Do Things That Don't Scale

Paul Graham wrote the definitive essay on this. The most successful YC companies got their first users through unscalable, manual, often embarrassing hustle. Airbnb founders went door to door in New York. Stripe founders installed their product for early users on the spot. DoorDash founders personally delivered food.

You do not need a marketing strategy to get your first 100 customers. You need to talk to people directly and convince them one at a time.

Why Founders Must Do Sales First

Founder-led sales serves two purposes:

1. It saves your capital. Every dollar you spend on ads or consultants before you understand your customer is wasted. You are paying to learn things you could learn for free by talking to people.
2. It creates the highest-fidelity feedback loop. When you do sales yourself, you hear directly where people lose interest, what blocks them from paying, what words resonate, and what falls flat. No report or dashboard gives you this.

Go Where Your Customers Are

Your customers are somewhere. They hang out in specific places, online and offline. Your job is to find those places and show up.

• Reddit communities for nearly every niche interest and problem
• Facebook groups where people discuss specific topics
• Slack and Discord communities for professional niches
• Twitter/X conversations around specific keywords
• LinkedIn for B2B prospects
• Local meetups and events where your people gather
• Industry conferences (but only if your buyers are there)

Find the watering holes. Go there. Listen first. Then engage.

Don't Spam. Engage.

When you find a community, do not immediately post about your product. That's spam. You will get banned and you will burn the opportunity.

Instead:

• Answer questions. Be genuinely helpful.
• Share insights from your experience.
• Ask thoughtful questions about problems you're solving.
• Build relationships before you pitch anything.

When you have credibility in a community, people will ask what you're working on. That's when you tell them.

The First 100 Customers

You do not need marketing automation to get 100 customers. You need persistence and a spreadsheet.

• Make a list of people who might have the problem you solve
• Reach out to them personally (email, DM, LinkedIn, Twitter)
• Have real conversations
• Ask if they want to try your product
• Follow up relentlessly

It's slow. It's manual. It works. And you will learn more from 100 direct conversations than from 10,000 ad impressions.

Learn Who Your Customer Is

When you get your first 100 customers through direct sales, pay attention to patterns:

• Who are they? (job title, company size, industry)
• Where did you find them?
• What words resonated with them?
• What objections did they have?
• Why did they say yes?

From these patterns, you can define a persona. Not a made-up marketing persona. A real one based on actual humans who paid you money.

Building Your Marketing Engine

Once you know who your customer is and where they hang out, you can start building repeatable channels:

1. Find more places where those people are. If your first 100 came from Reddit, what other subreddits might work? If they came from LinkedIn, what content resonates?
2. Create content that speaks to them. Write about their problems. Use their words. Share stories from your early customers.
3. Build systems to do what you did manually. If you found customers by answering questions on Twitter, can you do that more systematically? Can you create content that answers those questions at scale?

This is how a marketing engine is born. Not from a consultant's playbook. From patterns you discovered by doing the work yourself.

Never Stop Talking to Customers

Even when you have a marketing engine, even when you have a sales team, even when you have thousands of customers... you should still be talking to customers directly.

This is what the best founders do for the entire life of their company. It keeps you connected to real problems. It gives you direct feedback on your product. It prevents you from getting disconnected from the people you serve.

When to Spend Money on Marketing

You earn the right to spend money on marketing when:

1. You know exactly who your customer is
2. You know where they hang out
3. You know what message resonates with them
4. You have a product they will pay for
5. You have a repeatable sales process

Until then, spending money is just guessing with cash. Do the manual work first. Spend later.