In our last post we touched on the 3 most common mistakes bootstrapped founders make when trying to transition out of founder-led sales and make their first sales hire [when they’re not necessarily quite ready to do so]. As mitigation against those common mistakes, we put forward the concept of finding a “diamond in the rough” – someone not necessarily … Read More
“Candidates who have experienced failure with a back catalog of tales of adversity in their careers are of the most interest to me; in short, I am looking for someone who has failed”, to paraphrase the interviewer’s opening gambit. The occasion was a first interview to facilitate a move from one well established and mature industry into a relatively new, … Read More
Execution around sales and marketing remains a major challenge for B2B tech startups looking to move along the growth/valuation curve. Despite founders readily accepting the importance of sales and marketing in moving from startup to scale-up, execution remains a major barrier to success. As a gauge of the challenge, less than 1 in 5 startups accepting seed investment ever make … Read More
You’re a busy person. You’ve founded your B2B tech startup, got your product into the market and led from the front to win those first few key customers. You’ve proved that someone will pay for your product and it looks like you’ve made it onto the right trajectory for success. You may have taken a little seed money already and, … Read More
Conventional wisdom suggests you should screen all your candidates for a given role and then perform in-depth interviews with 3-5 of them and, hopefully, make your selection from there. However, does that conventional wisdom apply to B2B tech founders looking to make their first Sales hire? In any area of business, you would imagine that most hiring managers have a … Read More
Tech is a hot space and, for startups, hiring the right people is critical to the future success of the business. Given that most founders have a solid technical background, identifying whether a developer can do the job is relatively straight forward. Do they have the relevant Ruby experience, have they worked with Angular are both relatively straight forward to … Read More
