Every week, I advise founders on how to hit $10k MRR. On Tuesdays, I share my consulting notes from those private sessions. Learn from their mistakes so you don't burn your own cash.
He tried to hire me to sell his product. I said no.
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Hey Reader, A founder reached out to me last week with a "job opportunity." He had a finished product, a clean UI, and a pitch deck. He said, "Dmitry, I’ve seen your playbooks. You know how to talk to customers. I want to hire you to handle the sales so I can focus on building." I smiled. Then I told him two things he didn't want to hear. First, I asked: "If I’m the one finding the customers, closing the deals, and hearing the feedback — why exactly do I need you?" It sounds harsh, but it’s the truth of the early stage. If you outsource the "Value Exchange" (the sale) before you have Product-Market Fit, you aren't the founder anymore. You’re just a project manager for an idea that might not work. Then I asked the second question: "What do you think makes a founder?" Most people think being a founder is about having the idea. It’s not. Being a founder is about validating the idea. If you are "too busy building" to talk to your market, you aren't building a company — you're building a monument to your own assumptions. The Clarity Filter Insight The founder’s primary job isn't to write code or design screens. It is to be the bridge between a painful problem and a working solution. You cannot delegate the bridge-building until the bridge is solid. [Share on LinkedIn] | [Share on X] If you're afraid to sell, it’s usually because you don't yet believe your solution is a painkiller. Don't hire a salesperson to fix your conviction. Talk to your customers until that conviction is so high you’d feel guilty not selling it to them. Speak soon, P.S. Want to get to your first $10K MRR faster? |
Clarity Filter
Every week, I advise founders on how to hit $10k MRR. On Tuesdays, I share my consulting notes from those private sessions. Learn from their mistakes so you don't burn your own cash.
Hey Reader, Founders love to pitch an inevitable future. They see a clear shift in the market, build a product for that future, and launch. Then they get silent buyers and a dead pipeline. They assume the product is broken. Or the marketing is wrong. But the problem is usually much simpler: they are early. And in an early-stage startup, being ahead of your time is functionally indistinguishable from being wrong. A market can be directionally attractive and still be a terrible opportunity...
Hey Reader, In my last email, I broke down how Sam Altman’s relationship network literally purchased his first company's failure for millions. Most builders read that and thought: "Great, but I don't live in SF and I don't know any VCs." You are looking at networking all wrong. You don’t need billionaires. You need a net of adjacent peers who are 6 to 12 months ahead of you. If you want to know if your current network is there yet, here's a handy validator for ya: Look at your calendar for...
Hey Reader, Founders love the myth of the exceptional product. They believe Silicon Valley legends won because they built better software. Here is the reality. Sam Altman's first company, Loopt, had no real traction. It failed as a consumer product. It was acquired for millions anyway. Not because the tech was brilliant. Because Altman had well-connected VC relationships. When the app failed, his network caught him. The relationships were the infrastructure that literally purchased his...