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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

There's no doubt that experienced sales people are valuable, but I would argue that there is a point in a startup lifecycle where it's too soon to hire one. For one or both of two reasons:

1. You're still trying to figure out exactly what it is you're building and how to best price/sell it. That is, you're still in more of a "customer development" mode than a pure "push the accelerator on sales for all it's worth" model.

2. You don't have any money to hire a sales person, because you're either bootstrapping or haven't raised a round yet.

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To add to this, if you don't know how your product is sold, your first salesperson is going to have a much harder time doing it since you won't be able to share anything about what resonates with customers and what doesn't. Most of the good salespeople you'd want to hire as your first won't go anywhere that the founder isn't already doing sales.

Early sales isn't something you can outsource to someone else because it's as much product development as it is sales. Your sales process is essentially getting told no over and over, and then following up with "well what if it did this?".

That said, one hidden benefit of hiring someone to help with sales is that it forces you to spend time focusing on it (instead of just coding or whatever). It's sort of an expensive way to practice time management, but it can work if you need that push. Just don't expect the person to actually sell anything--figuring that out will still be mostly up to you.

Both excellent points! Also, sales people don't come cheap but effective sales people bring in far more revenue than they cost in commissions.

But... there is probably a baseline price below which it doesn't make sense to have a full time sales person knocking on doors. In that case, drop down one level to "Inside Sales" where you hire people to cold call a list and pitch your product.

If your product can't afford inside sales, sell direct online and optimize your funnel.

If someone even has to ask the question in the OP then they need a co-founder to handle the soft skills. I really think it's as simple as that. It's unreasonable to expect to be able to get good at everything.

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