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Comment by troubled1 | Hacker News Reader

Guess I should of been more clear. We are a marketing startup. We have contracts with businesses and our product is sold to consumers (average Joe).

On the consumer end, everything is perfect. Sales are up and user base is doubling every 2 weeks. Mixed responsibility. (I do customer support, SEO, design, etc and we share marketing ideas)

On the business end, we are still stuck with crappy deals: low margins, poor brands, etc. His responsiblity.

We are currently considering bringing in a sales guy/girl (for equity & comission). But while I still have a ton of work on the tech side, my co-founder who was supposed to be CEO and sales has so far failed on the sales dep and is not impressing me with his biz decisions nither. Thats the big worry.

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The first information was that your partner did not perform to your expectation. At the same time I read that half year passed your have not been out at the customer front to see if your business model is viable. Just because comparing to a competitor does not mean your business is in the same situation. The low margins, poor brand is both of your responsibility and can have many reasons.

As a startup founder you are the face of the company and there is no excuse to not talk to customers and close deals. Your are small team and there is no CEO or VP or Sales. It is you and him to close the deals. If you want your company to survive a simple phrase will do, do whatever it takes.

 And if you think this is not what you signed up for than follow the advice of many, stop it now and fast.

Have you guys read Steve Blank's stuff on Customer Development Process?

If you are not making enough margin, then are you asking for more money? Why not? Maybe you are not delivering enough value. You have to show people how they will make lots of money before they'll give you any of theirs.

I'm not quite following you there, you'll have to be a bit more clear. You write "we are a marketing startup", "we have contracts with businesses" and "our product".

Don't you mean their product ? Or are you reselling/rebranding ?

In other words, is the transaction with the end-user yours or is it make by the businesses that you have the contracts with ?

Getting big name brands to sign off on an unproven scheme can be pretty hard, using lesser known brands as a way to gain entry is by itself not such a bad thing, and bad margins can be incrementally improved upon proven performance, so you have some leverage there if you work at it.

I understand your reluctance to spell the whole thing out here but if you want actionable advice then you probably should take the plunge or take it off-line somehow.

Even a salesperson that you bring on board is not going to be an instant game changer, bringing a sales pipeline up to speed takes considerable time.

We have two other competitors (that I know of) who have a very similar offering (give or take) and all are at about the same stage (but the gap is widening).

The deals they have closed so far, are measurably better. (We even managed to get two biz owner that due to personal connections told us a bit more than fair about their dealings with one competitor).

So I am pretty certain where the weak spot is (and it was admitted to be so).

I am posting now because the competition is growing faster and widening the gap.

PS> Excellent comments and questions so far. I am reading the links and got some food for thought.

But that doesn't really answer any of the questions...

Sales being the 'weak spot' is easy because that's always the weak spot, but that doesn't mean that that is the root cause.

If your co-founder admits to his shortcomings but does make some sales that actually gives me a lot of hope.

I've been in that situation, too. I got out of it by us selling the company. You should get rid of your co-founder and step up to be CEO yourself and start looking for someone who will do good work. Your co-founder might not have the incentive like you do, so maybe he feels fine with being average. There is no way to change such a person.

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