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Comment by FloorEgg | Hacker News Reader

You are missing something really really important.

Most startups don't have product market fit. Further, most startups make things no one wants. The product might sound good to you and you will think "oh I can sell this", but you will work your ass off for no results.

They you may go back to the client and say "Hey the market doesn't want your product, they want this instead". Now you are doing free market research for them, and most likely, they won't listen to you anyways.

You may think "okay I need to be good at identifying startups struggling to sell who have products people want" and then you may realize there's a whole industry of VCs trying to do this, that mostly suck at it.

I think you'll find that young companies with products people want who are struggling to sell is extremely rare.

There's a reason the business model your suggesting isn't more prevalent with startups, and it's because sales skills matter far less than market fit.

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To add to this:

Most good founders (regardless of market fit) should be figuring out sales engines themselves. Especially the first version.

I would not invest in a company where the founder is trying to offload sales. Precisely because, as mentioned, sales, market fit and product are so deeply interlinked.

Yup. As a founder who outsourced sales early, I have big regrets because it always ended up being me actually making the sales with my network and ability to understand the market.

So the regret comes from wasting a lot of money. Always do your own sales first.

Sounds like there's market demand for a consultant that builds the sales engine then. A lot of people don't know what to say, how to say it, who to approach.

Edit:

Sort of, but not in the way you are thinking about it.

People want help with this yes, but they shouldn't be outsourcing it.

The founder needs to ask literally thousands of questions to the market (can vary depending on how simple or complex the market is). If they haven't asked these questions, then they shouldn't be outsourcing it.

If they have asked all the questions, they know who to approach, what to say, how to say it. Then they can hire consultants to help them build the sale engine, which is actually all about adopting the best tools, distributing work, hiring, performance management, incentive structure, etc.

The parts that are specific to the startup (who to connect with, what to ask, what to say) need to be figured out by the startup and done by the founders. The parts that are more generic to all companies (hiring, training, performance management, team structure, tool stacking). Can be outsourced, and probably should be if the founders don't know how to do these things or really don't want to.

Edit 2:

The reason the founders shouldn't be outsourcing this, is that the founders are the ones to decide which part of the market to focus on and what to prioritize in the product. If they try and outsource it to someone else, there is an extra layer of noise in the communication between the two.

There is also this thing called the innovators bias (lots of cognitive biases really) that will exacerbate the situation because the founders with the power will over-weight their own incorrect instincts against what they hear from one person (consultant), but they will more appropriate weight their instincts against what they hear from dozens to hundreds of actual possible customers.

Great insight and feedback from all above, thank you. My approach is to be more of a supporting actor that is heavily involved rather than someone you completely outsource to. I hope to find companies that are passionate about what they are building and have a demonstrated product-market fit, but lack the bandwidth to develop an entire sales process and department. I am envisioning becoming an onramp to sales where I start by providing low-risk representation to prove my value, grow revenue enough to justify hiring sales people, develop said people and processes, and then see if it makes sense to stay on or hand off a fully functioning sales department.

To begin, I want to keep the number of clients low and then narrow it down to the one experiencing enough growth to move to stage two and beyond. There's obviously a lot of pitfalls, but I'm a dreamer and hope to find a way to make it work!

This is a great point, and really meshes with my experience as well. We've had some great salespeople but deficiencies in the product (mainly lack of certain enterprisey features) made it very hard to sell. They worked their asses off and closed almost no deals. And our product was good and really close to what the market wanted. Contrast that with most startups which not only have to convince you to open your wallet but also to do so for a solution to a problem you don't currently have (or at least, don't know you have).

If you have an excellent sense for products then the model might work, but I've seen some of the smartest people I've ever met walk right into a wall, even when doing everything they can to reach/verify the fit. It's an incredibly hard problem

> You are missing something really really important.

> Most startups don't have product market fit. Further, most startups make things no one wants. The product might sound good to you and you will think "oh I can sell this", but you will work your ass off for no results.

For these exact reasons, this same business model would probably work really well if you were instead connecting pre-seed / seed round startups with VCs who commit to a round instead of customers lol

Also, the model you're suggesting is really common for well established products with product market fit. Insurance sales, Tupperware, Cutco, lots of other examples...

If you're really drawn to this model, just beware the MLM ones where you have to pay first to sell the product.

I launched and shut down a sales tech startup. This was the exact experience we had with earlier stage companies, particularly startups that do not have product market fit

Devil's Advocate: isn't selling making people believe they do want your product and are willing to pay for it? The vast majority of sales people are (mostly) paid on commissions.

agree and great comment.

maybe they should focus on. growth stage startups? frankly, even incumbant who are perpetually trying to play catchup and are more startup like in their core teams via transformation maturity and have what startups don't have, market fit and deep pockets.

target the enterprise b2b orgs in private equity portfolios.

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