Ask HN: Raise funds and hire salespeople, or look for third (sales) cofounder? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Raise funds and hire salespeople, or look for third (sales) cofounder?

Background: We're a bootstrapped company with monthly revenues in the $4,000/mo. range. We want to grow, but both of us have full time jobs and cannot dedicate time to sales.

We thought of two options:

1. We can raise $200,000 from a potential investor who approached us, and that would give us the funds to hire one or more salespeople

2. We can look for a third cofounder, offer them equity (e.g. 20% ownership) and put them in charge of sales

I suppose there's a third option, which is to wait longer until we have more cash in the bank before hiring a salesperson, but we consider that the slow approach and are looking for a faster way to grow.

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Do you have full time jobs outside of this company or do you work full time on different activities within your company?

What is the volume of a single contract sold? What are the cost to serve that contract? The difference is what you could put on the line as a commission in the short term. For most sales persons, that’s way more interesting than having shares in the company.

Depending on your product and how clear the sales targets are within companies, you might consider to start with someone very junior to just write intro mails and schedule demo calls for you with potential prospects. That saves a lot of time, but gives you the opportunity to gather direct feedback from the market - I don’t know any other way to improve product market fit than jumping on a demo with potential customers.

You really need to add whether it's a top down or bottom up sales approach AND some sort of overview of the product/service. These factors would change the advice dramatically.

Typically you should be doing the sales when you start out, and apply new hires once the sales system is in place (either w/ a cofounder or salesperson). Otherwise you might be screwing yourself or another person. Depending on the product/service... you might be able to get away with a strong marketing effort and kicking "sales" down the road too.

Learn sales yourself is a third option, you just have to allocate time to it and away from dev work. It will pay itself back many times over, not just in business either

I would find a third cofounder but offer less equity than 5-10% and start paying him/her with commission

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