Go to market strategy for startups.
First ten customers, then a machine. Pre product-market fit the job is finding a motion that repeats, not optimising one. The systems work is deliberately small, and the discipline is recording enough to learn from what you are already doing.
Ten customers, ten different stories.
Every deal closed for a different reason and the founder closed all of them. Nothing was written down, so nobody can tell which reason repeats. Hiring a salesperson now means hiring someone to run a process that does not exist yet.
Ten wins. No pattern.
Early stage — the missing patternThe smallest system that still teaches you something.
Record the why, not just the win
Structured reasons on won and lost deals from the first one. Twenty data points assembled deliberately beat two hundred collected carelessly.
A hypothesis about the segment
Written down, tested and revised. The value is in having made it falsifiable, not in having been right.
A pipeline with five stages
Not twelve. At this stage the pipeline exists to tell you where deals die, and more stages means more noise and less signal.
Founder-led selling instrumented
Capturing what the founder actually does on calls, because that is the process you will eventually hand to a first hire.
A stack you will not replace
The smallest set of tools that survives Series A. Migrating a CRM at forty people is an avoidable tax you pay for a decision made at five.
The first sales hire, set up to succeed
A documented motion, a defined territory and a ramp with milestones. Most first sales hires fail because they were asked to invent the process and execute it at once.
Strategy that ships as a system.
Diagnose
Where revenue actually comes from today, read from the systems rather than from the deck — sources, cycle times, win rates and the segments that quietly carry the number.
Decide
Segment, offer, motion and pricing written as decisions with owners and dates attached, not as a framework with boxes to fill in later.
Instrument
The CRM, the routing, the definitions and the dashboards rebuilt so the plan is measurable the week it launches rather than the quarter after.
Run it with you
We operate the motion alongside your team until the number repeats, then hand it over with the documentation to keep it repeating.
Enterprise machinery at seed.
Buying the stack a hundred-person revenue team runs, at eight people, produces a system that takes more effort to maintain than it returns. The correct amount of process early is the smallest amount that lets you learn. Everything else is a tax.
What people ask before they commit.
We are pre revenue. Is it too early?
For most of this, yes, and we will say so. What is worth doing early is recording deals in a way you can learn from. That is days of work, not a project.
Which CRM should we start on?
Something you will not have to leave. HubSpot free tier is a genuinely good start and scales with you. Spreadsheets work until roughly deal twenty and then cost you the history.
When should we hire a salesperson?
When a founder can describe the motion well enough that somebody else could run it. Hiring before that means paying someone to discover product-market fit, which is not their job.
Do you work with pre-seed companies?
Yes, at a much smaller scope. We also build and back companies ourselves, so the situation is familiar from the inside.
How long does it take?
Three to six weeks at this stage. The point is a system you outgrow deliberately rather than one you replace in a hurry.
Where people go from here.
Find the pattern first.
Tell us what you are running
What the system does today, where it breaks, and when it has to work. An engineer reads it — you get an answer inside one business day, not a sequence.