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When you’re building a startup from scratch, there are two things nobody warns you about enough: one, you’re going to have to sell. And, two, you’re probably going to be terrible at it at first.
I know I was. I didn’t have sales experience when I launched my previous company, Vungle. But we had no sales team, no leads and no brand to fall back on. If I wanted the company to survive, I had to learn to sell anyway.
I can say now, given hindsight, that the process of figuring it out the hard way is what set the foundation for what came later. Within a few years, we had grown to 250 employees across eight offices, with over $400 million in annual revenue. None of that would have happened if I hadn’t done the early sales myself.
Below are sales lessons I learned from those years, plus tactical tips any founder can apply, especially when no one’s answering your messages.
Related: 4 Steps to Becoming a Sales-Focused Founder (and Why It’s Important)
Find ways to show up where your customers already are
In our earliest days, we were trying to get mobile game developers to use Vungle’s ad tech, and cold outreach just wasn’t cutting it.
So we did something unconventional: We started playing the games themselves. Our team would log hours on popular titles just to land on the leaderboards. Once we were ranked, we’d change our usernames to short custom messages like “FromVungle_Please_Call_Us.”
This approach got us into conversations with developers who would’ve ignored us otherwise. In a sea of templated outreach, we stood out by embedding our message in the experience our customers were already having.
Now, I’m not saying that you should gamify your every outreach (unless, maybe, if your users are gamers). What I am suggesting is, if your cold outreach is falling flat, ask yourself: Are you showing up where your users are already engaged? Or are you just sending emails they didn’t ask for?
Stop talking about your product
Founders love talking about their product. That’s understandable given how this product is probably your labor of love. The catch is, in a cold message, your product isn’t the hook — your user’s pain is. For Vungle, one of the best-performing openers was something along the lines of:
“Hi, I saw your app on the charts. We’ve helped other developers boost revenue by 20% without changing the user experience. Worth a quick chat?”
See how we didn’t list our credentials or explain our tech stack? Instead, we led with something our audience cared about: incremental revenue for minimal effort.
If you’re doing cold outreach, assume the person reading your message has no context on who you are and doesn’t care yet. You need to earn that interest.
This matters more than it seems. Per a 2024 Salesforce report, 86% of business buyers are more likely to buy when their goals are understood. That means most early founders are leaving opportunities on the table by focusing their pitch too much on themselves and empathizing with their customers too little.
When you take time to craft your first message without thinking of it from the lens of a sales email, it’s proof you care enough to be relevant. That’s how you earn the right to pitch later.
Related: Give Your Employees The 3-Point Strategy They Need To Drive Sales
Build a repeatable engine first before you hand it off
It’s tempting to hire a salesperson the moment you feel overwhelmed. But hiring too early is one of the biggest mistakes I see founders make.
At Vungle, we didn’t hire a full-time salesperson until we’d already built a repeatable script and could train them on what worked. Until then, we built documentation like we’d build product docs: call flows, objection handling, competitive comparisons, sales enablement materials.
That’s what allowed us to scale sales from $850,000 to $15 million in one year, and then to $56 million the next.
If you don’t do this, you risk churning through sales hires. In that scenario, it’s very tempting to blame it on “bad fit.” In reality, you most likely just didn’t have a system.
How I see it, your biggest responsibility as a founder leading sales is actually NOT closing deals but writing the playbook. Until you’ve closed 10–20 deals yourself and can explain how you did it, you’re not ready to outsource.
Treat your sales outreach like an extension of product (because it is)
Founders often treat sales as something separate from product work. But early-stage selling is one of the fastest ways to refine your product. It shows you what customers actually care about. What they’re confused by. What they’re willing to pay for.
For instance, we thought our value proposition at Vungle was around the speed of integration. But during sales calls, we kept hearing that development teams were worried about crash rates and performance. We shifted our pitch — and later, our product roadmap — around those insights. That realignment made a huge difference in our win rates.
Early customer conversations reveal the “why” behind objections. It’s going to be very validating listening for praise. But resist the temptation. Instead tune in closer for confusion, hesitation and indifference. That’s the true product goldmine.
Related: How to Avoid These Costly Mistakes in Your Startup’s Sales Strategy
Reps > theory
If there’s one truth I’ve seen across every startup I’ve advised or invested in, it’s this: You can’t learn founder-led sales by reading about it. You have to do the reps.
Even as you outgrow founder-led sales, you’ll see that “sales” is actually not a temporary phase. It’s the muscle that helps you discover new markets and opportunities, raise money, recruit talent, and evangelize your mission. The sooner you build it, the more compound interest you’ll get on every part of your company.
All that’s to say: yes, founder-led sales is hard! It’s humbling. But it’s also the best path to real traction. If you’re in the early grind, remember that the best founders likely weren’t naturals either. They just cared and hustled enough to put in the reps
When you’re building a startup from scratch, there are two things nobody warns you about enough: one, you’re going to have to sell. And, two, you’re probably going to be terrible at it at first.
I know I was. I didn’t have sales experience when I launched my previous company, Vungle. But we had no sales team, no leads and no brand to fall back on. If I wanted the company to survive, I had to learn to sell anyway.
I can say now, given hindsight, that the process of figuring it out the hard way is what set the foundation for what came later. Within a few years, we had grown to 250 employees across eight offices, with over $400 million in annual revenue. None of that would have happened if I hadn’t done the early sales myself.
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