This week, we’re launching a brand-new series with First Round partner Meka Asonye all about the messy yet exhilarating phase of going from $0 to $5M in revenue.
0-$5M: How to Nail Founder-Led Sales
It’s a good time to be a builder.
With a remarkable slate of AI tooling at their fingertips, founders can go from idea to launch in record time, sprinting past (some) of the 0-1 building slog. What once required a technical team and months of iteration can now be built by a solo founder over a weekend. And there are headlines to prove it, with nearly brand-new startups touting full customer pipelines and millions in revenue already.
But the jury’s still out on whether these are flashes in the pan, or will have staying power when it comes time for contract renewals. For every startup that goes viral on X for growth curves that seem like vertical lines, there are quieter examples of ones that stall out. Nabbing that first few million in ARR might not always be the Everest climb it once seemed to be — but building a sustainable revenue engine is certainly not on easy mode now.
In an era where the answer to “Can you build it?” is yes much more often than no, the more important question isn’t just about velocity, but durability. In our view, that means the commercial pieces of a startup’s puzzle are more critical than ever. And they are not nearly so easy to rush or automate.
So we teamed up with First Round partner Meka Asonye for a brand-new series all about the GTM side of going from 0 to your first few million in ARR. He’s spent months interviewing an epic group of startup founders and early sales hires for their hard-won lessons and exact tactical advice for building a GTM motion from scratch. Think of it as the early GTM brain trust you wish you had on speed dial.
Once a month, we’ll share an installment in the series, featuring a constellation of different voices on some of the most critical topics for finding (and keeping) customers, like fine-tuning your ICP, forging design partnerships, and hiring your first dedicated salesperson.
For this first installment to launch the series, we’re starting with a topic that Meka has seen trip up plenty of sharp builders: founder-led sales.
From Meka’s deep-diving interviews, he plucked out six specific tactics that founders should consider when they move from the codebase to the sales demo. These aren't your typical LinkedIn bro tips about "crushing your number.” These are the actual tactics that worked, from folks who’ve been in your shoes as well as first sales hires who cleaned up some of the founder-led sales messes that came before.
Here’s who you’ll hear from today:
- Mike Molinet, who not only did founder-led sales to get Branch off the ground to over $100M in ARR, but is now back in the trenches doing it all over again with his new company, Thena
- Sam Taylor, who as Dropbox's first enterprise sales rep helped the company crack the code on moving upmarket before going on to lead sales at Quip and help build Loom's revenue engine
- Marta Bralic Kerns, who is the founder and CEO of Pomelo Care, a virtual maternity care platform that raised a $46M Series B last year, and was one of the earliest hires at Flatiron Health
- Eric Lasker, who started as one of the first sales hires at Stripe — back when there was no brand and no playbook — and is now leading the commercial charge at Varda Space as CRO
- Alexa Grabell, who is the founder and CEO of Pocus, an AI-powered platform for account research and prospecting
They cover advice for warming up your cold outreach, A/B testing your calls, nailing down some sales repeatability, and much more.
We're really curious to hear what you think about this new series and first post, so feel free to reply to this email with any thoughts or ideas for future topics.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
Recommended resources:
-Want more of Meka’s GTM wisdom before the next article drops? Revisit his lessons from sales leadership at Stripe and Mixpanel
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