Founder-Led Sales: A Practical Guide to Selling While Finding Product-Market Fit

Early-stage startup founders have to wear many hats—including that of the sales leader. In the beginning, there is often no sales team. It’s just you, the founder, hustling to land those crucial first customers. This process of founder-led sales—where the founder is at the forefront of selling at B2B startups on the path to product-market fit. It can be both exciting and exhausting. The good news is, it’s also one of the most valuable learning experiences you’ll have, and with the right approach and tools.

In this guide, we’ll dive deep into how you, as a founder, can successfully lead sales in the early days. We’ll cover real-world examples, practical frameworks for customer discovery, pipeline building, and sales messaging, and ways to streamline the grind (including how Skarbe—a lightweight, startup-first sales tool—can ease the process). By the end, you should feel fired up to do sales and confident that you’re not alone on this journey. Let’s get started!

What is Founder-Led Sales and Why It Matters

Founder-led sales refers to a strategy in which the founder/CEO personally drives the sales process in the earliest stages of a company. Instead of immediately hiring salespeople, the founder leverages their deep product knowledge and passion to engage customers, pitch the solutionб close deals and adjust the product. This approach is common and necessary when you start—and for good reason:

• Unique insight and authenticity: As the creator of the product, you understand the problem and solution inside-out. You can answer intricate questions and convey the value with unmatched conviction. There’s also a personal authenticity in a founder’s pitch—customers sense your commitment. For instance, in the early days of Dropbox, founder Drew Houston personally explained the product’s unique value to initial users, leveraging his technical insight to win them over. Similarly, Brian Chesky, co-founder of Airbnb, famously met with early hosts in person to learn from them and demonstrate the platform’s value, building trust through that hands-on approach.

• Speed of learning and iteration: Founder-led sales forces you to talk directly with customers from day one. The feedback you gather in sales meetings and demos flows straight back into your product decisions. You’ll quickly learn which use-cases resonate, which objections come up frequently, and what features customers wish for. In fact, many investors argue that finding product-market fit is tightly intertwined with these early customer conversations (0-$5M: How to Nail Founder-Led Sales)—the questions you ask in customer discovery and the customer profile you refine set the stage for scalable growth.

• Momentum for the business: There’s evidence that founder-led companies often outperform others in the early days (Why Founder-Led Sales is so powerful for startups). The hustle of a founder out there selling can create early revenue, reference customers and market credibility that attract further customers (and investors!). Simply put, if you can sell it, you can likely build a business around it—and nobody can sell a new product better than a founder of that product.

But let’s be real: being a founder-salesperson is hard. 

One moment you’re debugging the product, the next you’re cold-emailing a potential client, then jumping on a demo call. It’s a lot to juggle. If you feel stretched thin, you’re not alone—it’s okay to admit founder-led sales is challenging. The key is to embrace it as a learning process. In the sections that follow, we’ll break down how to make the most of founder-led sales, step by step.

Customer Discovery: Laying the Foundation for Sales

“It all starts with a conversation.” Before you can sell anything, you need to deeply understand your potential customers and their pain points. Customer discovery is the foundation of successful founder-led sales. In practice, this means spending time talking to prospects and listening — truly listening — to their problems, workflows, and goals. Remember, the first step is understanding the problem you’re trying to solve. In fact, the number one reason startups fail is building something nobody wants (i.e. “no market need” according to studies). Founder-led sales is your chance to avoid that trap.

Here are some practical guidelines and frameworks for effective customer discovery as a founder:

• Start with a hypothesis: Outline who you think your ideal customer is and what pain point you believe your product solves for them. This is your initial hypothesis—e.g. “I believe that VPs of Sales at tech startups struggle to keep their reps focused on selling instead of admin.” This hypothesis will guide whom you talk to and what you ask, but be prepared to adjust it as you learn more.

• Recruit people to talk to: Reach out to folks who fit your target user profile. In early stages, this might be friends, former colleagues, LinkedIn connections or even friendly referrals from investors. Be transparent that you’re a founder looking to understand their needs (people are often surprisingly willing to help a fellow entrepreneur with insights). Aim for at least 8-10 discovery conversations to start, across a variety of profiles if possible, to spot patterns.

• Ask open-ended questions and listen: In discovery interviews, focus on learning, not selling. This is critical. Spend most of the time asking questions and listening, not pitching your solution. Encourage them to talk about how they currently do things and what’s frustrating or inefficient. A pro tip: ask them to recall a recent time they faced the problem you target (“Tell me about the last time you tried to do X. What went wrong?”). Open-ended prompts like that reveal stories and emotions and help avoid wishful thinking. “Gaining a deep understanding of the problems that customers face is how you build products that provide value and grow. It all starts with a conversation. You have to let go of your assumptions so you can listen with an open mind and understand what’s actually important to them.” In other words, approach each chat as a humble fact-finding mission. You’re not there to convince them—you’re there to learn more.

• Don’t pitch too early: It’s tempting to share your product and its features the moment someone mentions a related pain. Resist that urge initially. If you pitch too soon, you’ll bias the conversation and might miss out on hearing the unvarnished truth. Instead, keep asking “why?” and “how do you handle that today?” a few layers deep. You can certainly mention what you’re working on, but frame it as “Here’s what we think might help—how does that resonate?” rather than a full sales pitch. This way, you’re validating your direction without selling hard. As one Harvard Business School guide puts it: use interviews to discover and learn, not to validate your preexisting opinion or push a sale.

• Define and refine your ICP: ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. After a round of interviews, you should start seeing who has the “hair on fire” problem that your product addresses. Maybe it turns out that mid-market sales managers respond much more excitedly to your idea than C-level executives, or vice versa. Take note of the characteristics (industry, role, company size, use case) of those who seem to need your solution the most. It’s often useful to create a simple persona document—e.g. “Meet Alice, a 5-person startup founder who is overwhelmed managing leads…”—to crystallize the traits of your target customer. Defining and prioritizing personas is an essential part of customer discovery. It helps focus your product and messaging on who matters most.

• Capture the language and pain points: Pay attention to the exact words people use when describing their challenges. Do they say “I’m drowning in spreadsheets” or “I waste so much time updating our CRM” or “I can’t get a hold of prospects”? These phrases are gold for later crafting your sales messaging (you’ll mirror the customer’s own language back to them). Also, ask them how big the problem is — e.g. “Is this a major headache or just a minor nuisance?” — to gauge severity. Your goal in discovery is to identify a pain worth solving (ideally a big pain felt by many similar customers). As one founder insightfully noted, “You’re trying to define not just how painful the problem is, but whether it’s big enough across enough people that it’s worth building a product (and company) to solve”.

• Iterate and prioritize: After each conversation, jot down your learnings. What hypothesis was validated or invalidated? You might discover, for example, that smaller companies have the pain more acutely than larger ones, or that your assumed problem isn’t the one they emphasize — they keep bringing up another related issue. Treat these interviews as iterative learning. Refine your questions over time (for instance, if a particular topic yields great insight, ask it in the next interview too). After a round of interviews, regroup and update your understanding of the customer and their needs. This will directly inform how you approach sales. By the end of this discovery phase, you should be much sharper on who you’re targeting and why they need you, which will make your sales efforts far more effective.

In summary, customer discovery is about empathetic listening and probing for truth. Genuinely understanding your customer’s world is step one to selling to them. It gives you the confidence that your product addresses a real pain, and it arms you with the customer-centric language you’ll use in your sales pitches and marketing. Many successful founders credit early customer conversations as the key to nailing their value proposition. Stay curious, stay open-minded, and remember that every “no” or lukewarm response is actually precious feedback to guide you toward product-market fit.

Building a Pipeline from Zero: How to Organize and Track Your Leads

Once you’ve talked to a bunch of prospects and early users, you’ll (hopefully) start to see some who are interested in trying or buying your solution. Now the question becomes: how do I manage these potential deals and systematically turn interest into revenue? This is where building a sales pipeline comes in.

A sales pipeline is simply an organized, visual way to track potential customers as they move through your sales process. Think of it as your bird’s-eye view of all deals: who you’ve contacted, who’s responded, who’s in a trial or negotiation, and so on. Even if you only have a handful of leads, keeping a pipeline ensures no one falls through the cracks. It brings clarity to a chaotic process by breaking it into stages. In a typical pipeline, you might have stages like Prospect Contacted → Needs Discussed → Demo/Trial → Proposal → Closed Won (and perhaps Closed Lost for deals that didn’t pan out). As one sales guide notes, a pipeline adds a layer of accountability by making you explicitly track each deal’s status, so you always know where things stand. This is vital when you’re juggling many conversations and wearing multiple hats—the pipeline becomes your external brain for sales.

Here’s how a founder can build and manage an early sales pipeline:

1. Start a Simple List of Prospects: Begin with the people or companies who have shown some level of interest or who fit your target profile. This could include those customer discovery interviewees who said, “If you build this, let me know,” signups from your landing page, referrals you’ve gotten, and anyone who responded positively to your cold outreach. Don’t worry if it’s a short list initially. Quality matters more than quantity at the start.

2. Use a Basic Tool to Track Stages: You don’t need fancy CRM software right away (we’ll discuss tools shortly). Many founders use a spreadsheet or a Trello/Notion board as their first CRM. The key is to have columns or fields for: Name of lead, Contact info, Last interaction date, Current stage, Next step. For example, you might have a Google Sheet with rows of companies and columns like “Last Contacted On”, “Next Action Item”. Or a Trello board where each card is a lead and the lists are your pipeline stages. Choose whatever is easiest for you to actually use consistently. The point is to externalize the information from your head into a system.

3. Define Your Pipeline Stages: As mentioned, break your sales process into a few discrete stages. Early on, you can keep it simple: maybe Contacted → Meeting Scheduled → Proposal/Trial → Decision Pending → Closed. Tailor these to your process; if you’re doing free pilots, one stage might be “Pilot in Progress”. As you get more experience, you can adjust the stages. The idea is that at any given moment, you can look at your pipeline and see, for instance, 5 leads in “Contacted” (awaiting reply to initial reachout), 3 in “Meeting Scheduled” (calls booked this week), 2 in “Decision Pending” (you’ve sent them an offer and waiting to hear), etc. This visualization is incredibly helpful to manage your focus. It will highlight bottlenecks (e.g. if a lot of leads get stuck after the demo stage, you might need to improve your demo or follow-up). If you aren’t using a sales pipeline, you may lack insight into where your deals stand and why some aren’t moving forward. So get those stages down on “paper” and move leads through them as things progress.

4. Push Deals Forward with Next Actions: A pipeline isn’t just a static tracker; it should prompt you to act. For each active deal, always note the “next action” and schedule it. For example: “Send follow-up email with proposal” or “Call on Tuesday to check in”. If a week goes by and a deal has no next action or update, that’s a red flag—it could be slipping through. As the founder-salesperson, you have to be relentless on follow-ups. It often takes several touches to get a response or move to the next step. Don’t be shy about politely nudging prospects—they’re busy, and a gentle reminder is usually welcome. Many founders set aside time each week (or each day) to review the pipeline and make sure every active lead is being advanced or at least touched. This habit can dramatically improve your win rate. Consistent follow-up is a simple thing that sets apart successful early sales efforts.

5. Treat it as a Learning Pipeline: In these early stages, your pipeline is not just a deal tracker—it’s also a feedback loop. Pay attention to conversion rates between stages. Do a lot of contacts agree to a meeting (good outreach messaging), but then few move from meeting to trial (maybe the value prop isn’t landing in the meeting)? Each stage drop-off can signal where to improve. For instance, if you’ve done 10 demos but only 1 converted to a paying customer, dive into what happened in those demos or afterward. Maybe you’re attracting the wrong customer profile, or maybe customers want a feature that’s missing post-trial. Early pipeline data is qualitative and quantitative fodder to iterate your approach. Keep tweaking your sales approach (the type of customers, your pitch, the materials you share, etc.) as you learn.

6. Example—The Power of a Little Process: To illustrate why having a pipeline and process matters, consider this anecdote from a fellow founder. Alexa Grabell, founder & CEO of Pocus, reflected on her time doing founder-led sales: “In the founder-led sales era, I admittedly ran a pretty messy sales process... I was moving so quickly that process was not top of mind. I always followed my gut instead of following a tailored flow... Two years ago I would say a step-by-step process was overkill for founder-led sales. But the more prescriptive we got with our process, the more deals we closed.” (0-$5M: How to Nail Founder-Led Sales). In other words, even a lightweight structure (like defining those stages and steps) can dramatically improve your outcomes. It doesn’t mean bureaucracy—it means clarity and repeatability. As soon as Alexa introduced a bit more rigor (consistent discovery, demo, proposal, etc.), prospects responded better and sales grew. The lesson: you don’t need to over-engineer your sales process, but having a clear, repeatable playbook—even a simple one—builds momentum and ensures you can hand off sales to others down the line.

• Keep Your Pipeline Groomed: Lastly, maintain the hygiene of your pipeline. Close out deals that are truly dead (it’s okay—not every lead will convert). Mark them as lost, and perhaps note the reason (no budget, not a priority now, went with competitor, etc.). This helps you not fixate on long-shots and instead focus on active ones. Celebrate the “Closed Won” deals by moving them to that column—visual motivation! And keep adding new prospects to the top of the funnel to replace those that fall off. Pipeline building is an ongoing activity, especially as you search for product-market fit.

In summary, think of your pipeline as the backbone of your sales efforts. It brings order to the chaos and ensures you wake up each day knowing who you should email or call next. As a busy founder, this clarity is priceless. It will help you stay on top of every opportunity, which directly translates to revenue and learning. And don’t worry if your pipeline tool is just a Notion table or a whiteboard with sticky notes—use whatever you will actually update. The sophistication of the tool matters far less than your consistency in using it.

Crafting Your Sales Messaging and Pitch

With customers in your pipeline and conversations happening, the next challenge is what exactly to say to persuade someone to try or buy your product. Founders often start out talking about their product in highly technical or passionate terms (after all, you’ve been living and breathing it), but effective sales messaging requires framing that story around the customer’s needs. The goal is to craft messaging that resonates—that makes your target customer think “Yes, that’s me. I need this.”

Here’s how to develop practical sales messaging as a founder:

• Lead with the Customer’s Pain, Not Your Product: A classic mistake is starting your pitch with “We built an AI-powered platform that does X.” Instead, start by addressing the problem from the customer’s perspective. For example: “Many small sales teams struggle to keep leads from slipping through the cracks—I’m sure you’ve felt the pain of a deal going cold because you got too busy.” By opening with their problem, you immediately hook their attention because you’re talking about them, not you. Only after you’ve outlined the pain and why it matters, introduce your solution as the relieving answer.

• Articulate a Clear Value Proposition: You should be able to summarize what your product does and why it’s valuable in one or two concise sentences—this is your value proposition. A simple formula is: We help [WHO] do [WHAT] so that [BENEFIT]. For instance, “We help early-stage founders manage their sales pipeline in 10 minutes a day, so they never lose a potential deal even with a tiny team.” This kind of statement makes it clear whoshould care and why. Make sure the benefit is something that truly matters to the customer (e.g. saving time, saving money, increasing conversion, reducing risk, etc.). If you’re not sure what benefit to highlight, lean on what you heard in discovery—if people said “I spend too much time doing X,” then saving time is a huge draw.

• Use the Language Your Customers Use: Recall those phrases and keywords you gathered during discovery. Incorporate them into your messaging. If everyone you spoke to calls something “my lead list,” don’t suddenly call it “prospect database” in your pitch—mirror their terminology to create instant familiarity. This shows you “get it” and have been paying attention. It can be subtle things like using “close more deals” vs “increase sales efficiency” depending on what your audience cares about. Match your tone to the customer’s style as well; some audiences prefer an analytical approach with data, others respond to an emotive story. You likely have a sense of this from talking to them.

• Build an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Tailor the Message: If you have more than one type of customer (say, you could sell to HR teams and Sales teams, or to SMB and enterprise), consider creating slightly different messaging for each segment. A one-size-fits-all pitch often ends up too generic. By building an ICP for your key segment (What is Sales Messaging? 6 Steps to Create Your Own and Make it Shine), you can focus your messaging on what that segment cares about. For example, for a founder persona, you might emphasize “as a founder myself, I know you have no time—this tool does the follow-ups for you.” For a sales manager persona, the message might tweak to “as a sales leader, you need visibility—this gives you instant insight without burdening your reps.” The core product is the same, but the angle shifts to hit the specific pain point of that audience.

• Storytelling and Social Proof: Humans remember stories, not bullet points. Try weaving a simple narrative into your messaging. This could be your founder’s story (“I was a small business owner drowning in CRM updates, so I built this tool to solve it”), which resonates especially in founder-led sales because customers often love to support a founder with a relatable journey. Or you can tell a customer story (“One of our early users, a startup CEO like you, was able to triple her outreach volume after using our product, leading to 2 extra deals last quarter”). Even if you only have beta users or pilots, use anecdotes from them as testimonials (with permission or as anonymized examples). Something like: “A beta user told us our solution was like having an extra team member handling their follow-ups—that’s exactly what we strive for.” Real-world examples add credibility and make your solution tangible.

• Highlight Benefits, Backed by Features: When explaining your product, distinguish between features and benefits. Features are what the product does (e.g. “automatically logs call notes”), benefits are what the customer gets from it (“so you never forget important details and can follow up intelligently”). Founder-led sales calls can get overly feature-heavy (“let me show you how this integration works...”)—instead, keep tying each feature to a benefit. A useful mini-framework is: “Our product does X, which means [benefit Y for you].” For example, “Our app transcribes your sales calls automatically, which means you can focus on the conversation and later search the transcript for any details you missed.” Always answer the customer’s unspoken question: “What’s in it for me?”

• Prepare for Common Objections: Part of messaging is also knowing how to respond to the reasons a prospect might hesitate. By now, you might have heard things like “We’re not ready to implement something new” or “This sounds expensive” or “How is this different from using a spreadsheet?” List out the top objections or tough questions and craft clear, confident responses. For instance, if price is an objection and you’re affordable, emphasize ROI: “I understand budget is tight—actually, our pricing is less than what you’d spend on one coffee a day, and customers typically see a 5x return in saved time.” If they worry about complexity, you might say, “Totally hear you—we designed this to be up and running in 5 minutes with no technical setup, unlike a typical CRM.” Preparing these talking points ahead will make you much more convincing in the moment. You won’t be caught off guard, and you can turn objections into opportunities to reinforce value.

• Test and Iterate Your Pitch: Just like you iterate the product, iterate your messaging. Pay attention to how people react on sales calls or in emails. Do they nod along when you mention a certain pain? Do they get excited about a particular benefit? If certain phrases or analogies seem to click (or conversely, confuse), adjust accordingly. For example, you might find that describing your solution as “like an invisible assistant” makes people smile and get it—run with that if it works. On the other hand, if your fancy tagline doesn’t land and you always find yourself re-explaining it, consider simplifying the wording. You can even A/B test messaging in your outreach emails: send two versions highlighting different benefits and see which gets more replies. Early on, every interaction is a chance to refine how you communicate your product’s value.

• Keep it Conversational and Founder-Personal: One advantage you have as a founder doing sales is you can be more informal and personal than a typical sales rep. Use that to your benefit. When appropriate, speak from the “I” perspective: “I built this because...” or “We’re a small team like you; we get these struggles...” This builds a human connection. You’re not a polished corporate sales machine, and that’s okay—many customers find it refreshing. Just make sure to also be concise and clear. Don’t ramble on (a common founder habit when we get excited). Practice a short pitch and stick to key points, but deliver it in a genuine, conversational tone as if you’re talking to a friend about how you can help them.

By honing your sales messaging with these principles, you’ll be far better equipped to convince skeptical early customers. To recap, focus on the customer’s pain, clearly articulate how you solve it, use their language, and share stories or proof to build credibility. As you engage in founder-led sales, you’ll naturally get better at messaging—every pitch is practice. Write down versions of your key talking points and keep improving them. Eventually, you’ll have a repeatable pitch (or even a script) that you know works, and that’s when selling starts to feel much smoother.

Automating and Streamlining Sales (When You’re the Only Salesperson)

By this point, you might be thinking: “This all sounds great, but it also sounds like a lot of work for one person to handle!” You’re not wrong. Founder-led sales involves many repetitive tasks and follow-ups that can eat up your time. Studies have found that sales reps spend only about one-third of their time actually selling—the rest is often administrative busywork. As a founder juggling product development, fundraising, and everything else, you have even less time to spare. That’s why it’s critical to work smarter, not just harder, by leveraging tools and automation to lighten the load.

The Burden of the Traditional Sales Stack

In the modern sales world, a typical sales team uses a stack of tools: a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system like Salesforce or HubSpot to manage contacts, perhaps a marketing automation tool for email sequences, a call recording tool, a spreadsheet for tracking certain metrics, maybe a Zapier integration to make them talk to each other, and so on. These platforms are powerful—but for a scrappy startup in search of product-market fit, they can be overkill and even counterproductive.

If you’ve ever tried setting up a traditional CRM as a solo founder, you’ve likely felt the pain. Big CRMs are often built for large organizations with dedicated admins and complex reporting needs. They demand meticulous data entry, customization of fields and pipelines, and constant updating. You might spend hours just configuring a Salesforce or HubSpot account—time that isn’t spent talking to customers or building your product. We’ve heard many founders say things like, “I set up [Popular CRM] because I thought I needed to, but a month later I realized I wasn’t keeping it updated at all. It became a graveyard for stale contacts while I was actually tracking things in my notebook.” In early startup life, agility is key, and anything that slows you down or adds friction can hurt.

Moreover, using a patchwork of tools can lead to things slipping through cracks. Maybe you log a meeting in your calendar, record notes in a doc, update a Google Sheet pipeline, and set a reminder in your phone to follow up—that’s a lot of cognitive load and places to check. It’s easy to forget to update one of them. One manual error (like forgetting to set that follow-up reminder) and you might lose a deal. Founders often resort to spreadsheets as a lightweight solution (I’ve done it too). Spreadsheets do work to an extent, but spreadsheets rely on you remembering to manually input every detail, and they won’t proactively remind you about tasks. As Skarbe’s founder Mikita Martynau observed from experience, big CRMs are “too complex, too much admin, and built for managers,” while spreadsheets “work… until they don’t” when important follow-ups start slipping through the cracks.

So what’s the alternative? How can you get the benefits of a CRM (organization, reminders, analytics) without the heavy lifting? This is exactly the problem we set out to solve with Skarbe.

Meet Skarbe: A Startup-First Sales Engine (CRM Without the Headache)

Skarbe is a new approach to managing sales for founders and small teams. Think of it as your personal sales assistant that takes care of the grunt work so you can focus on the human part of selling. In fact, Skarbe brands itself as “the pro-active sales engine that is CRM-free”. The idea is to give you the power of a CRM and sales automation without the tedious setup and maintenance. Here’s how Skarbe (and tools like it) can make founder-led sales more manageable:

• Automates Your Busywork: Skarbe automatically captures and organizes your sales data in one place. For example, it can log your emails with prospects, track when you last contacted someone, and even record and transcribe your sales calls without you doing a thing. All those hours spent updating contact records and writing call notes? Skarbe handles a lot of that for you. It’s as if you had a virtual sales coordinator on your team, making sure the CRM is always up-to-date. This is huge for a founder, because every hour saved on admin is an hour you can spend building relationships or refining your product.

• Guides You on What to Do Next: One of the most stressful parts of managing sales alone is keeping mental tabs on every deal’s status and next step. Skarbe acts like an intelligent inbox for your deals—it will tell you what needs attention. For instance, it might prompt you: “It’s been 3 days since you sent a proposal to Company X, time to follow up,” or “You haven’t heard back from Lead Y in a week, here’s a drafted follow-up email you can send.” This kind of proactive nudging ensures nothing falls through cracks. It’s akin to having a chief-of-staff for your sales pipeline, constantly scanning and reminding you so you never miss a beat. Contrast this with a generic CRM where unless you pull a report or check dashboards, you might not notice a silent deal going cold.

• All-in-One Convenience: Instead of juggling five different apps, Skarbe aims to be a one-stop shop. It combines multiple functions: contact management, pipeline tracking, call recording, email sequencing, note-taking, and even analytics. For example, Skarbe can automatically draft follow-up emails based on call transcripts or notes—saving you from crafting routine emails every time. It’s built so that when you finish a sales call, the call is already logged, transcribed, and a follow-up email template is ready for you to review. Automate follow-ups, transcribe calls, update CRM, draft emails—all in one place is the mantra. The result is you spend less time switching between tools and more time actually engaging with customers.

• Zero (or Minimal) Setup: As a founder, you don’t have time for a week-long CRM onboarding. Skarbe is designed to be plug-and-play. You sign up (it’s free to start, with a usage-based model as you grow), connect your email and calendar, and it starts doing its thing. The interface is simplified for small teams—you won’t see 50 tabs and modules that you’d never use. It’s intentionally opinionated to suit startup sales. You can think of it as a CRM that’s already pre-configured with best practices for founder-led sales, so you skip the tedious configuration and get straight to using it. As Mikita (Skarbe’s founder) said to the community, “We built Skarbe for founders and small sales teams—people who have been ignored by most sales tools. Big CRMs are overkill... We built this to save you 2 hours a day on manual tasks”.

• Built by a Founder Who’s Been There: Skarbe’s approach was born from firsthand pain. Mikita Martynau, the CEO and co-founder of Skarbe, previously led sales in a small startup setting (and even as a product leader at a later-stage company). He experienced the frustration of spending more time updating CRMs and managing spreadsheets than actually closing deals. So he set out to create a solution tailored for the startup scenario—where one person might be doing it all, where agility matters more than complex analytics, and where you need to integrate sales into your already crazy founder schedule. Knowing that background can be reassuring: the tool is made with your specific challenges in mind, not for a Fortune 500 sales team. (Plus, as a neat side note, Mikita’s mastery of founder-led sales and keeping a tight ship with Skarbe’s system helped him demonstrate enough traction and customer insight to close a pre-seed funding round for Skarbe—a great example of sales excellence feeding into fundraising success. More on the fundraising angle shortly.)

• Skarbe vs Traditional CRM at a Glance: To summarize the contrast, here’s a quick comparison:

In essence, Skarbe is like having a smart co-pilot for your founder-led sales journey, whereas a traditional CRM is more like a 747 airplane—amazing for a large crew on a long-haul flight, but overkill when you’re flying a small personal plane. By using a tool built for startups, you can reclaim a significant chunk of your time and mental energy.

Now, a word of advice: whether you use Skarbe or not, do consider incorporating automation early on. Even simple hacks can help—like email templates for common follow-ups, calendar scheduling links to avoid back-and-forth, or using a notetaking app that transcribes meetings. The goal is to reduce the manual overhead of selling, so you can spend your effort on high-value activities (building relationships, understanding customer needs, negotiating deals).

However, if you find yourself procrastinating on follow-ups or losing track of leads, that’s a strong signal to try something like Skarbe. It’s built to make sure those things don’t happen. Founders who have adopted startup-focused sales tools often report feeling “less stressed that I’m forgetting something” and “more on top of my funnel than ever before.” One user mentioned it was like going from chaos to having a personal CRM secretary who never forgets—a game changer for their sanity.

By automating the repetitive parts of founder-led sales, you essentially multiply yourself. You can handle more leads with the same amount of time, which might be the difference between stagnating and hitting that key early revenue milestone. It’s no coincidence that Mikita and team were able to leverage Skarbe’s approach to manage their pipeline so effectively that it impressed investors during their pre-seed raise—they could demonstrate a process and traction that stood out.

Founder-Led Sales and Fundraising: Selling Your Vision to Investors

Before we conclude, it’s worth touching on the link between founder-led sales and fundraising. In many ways, when you pitch to investors, you’re doing another kind of sale—selling the vision of your company and proof that you can execute. Mastering founder-led sales can give you a leg up in fundraising for a few reasons:

• Traction Speaks Louder Than Words: Investors love to see that you’ve actually sold your product to real customers. If you can walk into a pitch meeting and show a growing pipeline or a handful of paying early adopters, it provides tangible evidence that there’s a need for what you’re building. It de-risks the “no market need” concern dramatically. Even modest revenue or a couple of pilot customers can make a huge difference. It shows you’re not just theorizing—you’re out there making things happen. Many founders have essentially “sold” their way into a pre-seed or seed round by securing letters of intent or pilot contracts from reputable customers, proving demand.

• Refined Narrative: Going through the process of selling to customers forces you to refine how you explain your product and the problem it solves. By the time you pitch investors, you’ve likely honed a crisp value proposition and can handle tough questions (since you’ve fielded plenty of objections from customers already!). In short, doing sales first makes your pitch deck storytelling much stronger. You’ll naturally include anecdotes from your sales journey (“when talking to 50 potential users, we consistently heard X, which is why we’re confident about Y...”). That kind of customer-backed insight is gold in investor meetings.

• Demonstrating Founder Grit and Market Know-How: Investors often bet on the jockey (the founder) as much as the horse (the idea). By executing founder-led sales, you demonstrate hustle, resourcefulness, and a close connection to the market. You can speak about your customers’ pain points and industry dynamics with a credibility that purely product-focused founders might lack. For example, Mikita’s experience in tirelessly doing sales for Skarbe not only landed customers but also showed investors that he deeply understands the sales tech space and the needs of small sales teams. It’s compelling when a founder can say, “I’ve personally talked to 100 potential customers in this sector in the last 6 months, and here’s what I’ve learned.” It marks you as a customer-obsessed founder, which is a very positive signal.

• Closing Investors is Still Selling: Many of the techniques we discussed—understanding your audience, crafting a resonant message, handling objections, creating urgency—apply to fundraising conversations too. When you’ve practiced on customers, you’ll be more adept at “selling” your company to VCs. You’ll listen to their concerns (market size, business model, etc.) and address them effectively, just as you would a customer’s concerns. In fact, some founders treat fundraising like another sales pipeline: tracking interested investors, follow-up conversations, etc., which is a smart approach. Founder-led sales essentially trains you in persuasive communication and resilience, both key for fundraising.

A great example of tying fundraising to founder-led sales is Skarbe’s own story: After dogfooding their product and process, Mikita and his team were able to build a compelling narrative for investors on how Skarbe solves a painful problem evidenced by their early user engagement. By showing how efficiently they could acquire and manage those users (with a minimal team, thanks to their automated approach), they convinced investors that they had a scalable go-to-market in the making. This contributed to successfully closing their pre-seed round—effectively, proving the business by doing founder-led sales unlocked the capital to grow further.

The takeaway here is: don’t view sales and fundraising as separate silos. They reinforce each other. Early customer wins can directly lead to investor wins. And the skills you gain from selling (storytelling, resilience, understanding customer/investor psychology) will make you a better fundraiser. Conversely, the capital you raise will eventually allow you to hire a sales team or invest more in your sales process, taking the burden off you down the line. It’s a virtuous cycle.

So as you push through those early sales calls and perhaps feel disheartened by rejections, remember that every bit of progress is not only revenue—it’s also building the case for your startup’s viability in the eyes of investors. In a way, your first customers are like mini-investors (they invest their time/money to try your product), and your early investors are like customers (they must be sold on your vision). Excel at one, and you’ll likely excel at the other.

Embrace the Journey and Don’t Go It Alone

Founder-led sales is one of the hardest but most rewarding jobs you’ll undertake in your startup’s early life. By now, we’ve covered a lot of ground: from understanding your customers deeply through discovery, to building a pipeline that keeps you organized, to crafting messaging that hits home, to leveraging automation (via tools like Skarbe) to make the whole process more efficient. The common thread through all of this is being proactive and customer-centric. You, as the founder, have the unique ability to iterate rapidly—on the product and on your sales approach—based on direct feedback. That’s your superpower in this stage. Use it.

A few final encouraging thoughts:

• Every “No” Gets You Closer to “Yes”: You will face rejection in founder-led sales. Lots of it. That’s normal. Don’t be discouraged; learn from each “no.” Was it truly a bad fit customer? Was it something missing in the product? Or did your messaging not resonate? Treat it as free advice to improve. And celebrate the small wins—that enthusiastic response from one prospect can outweigh ten lukewarm replies.

• Systematize What Works: As you find emails that get replies, demo phrases that make eyes light up, or follow-up cadences that consistently book meetings—document them. You’re essentially developing your playbook for sales. This is what you’ll later teach new hires. But even in the short term, having a documented process will ensure you execute consistently even on tiring weeks. Process = peace of mind.

• Remember You’re Not Alone: Thousands of founders are out there every day, just like you, doing cold outreach, handling sales calls from their kitchen tables, and figuring it out as they go. It can feel isolating, but there’s a community of founder-sellers. Don’t hesitate to reach out and swap tips or just commiserate. And within your own startup, if you have co-founders or team members, involve them in sales too, or at least in brainstorming approaches. Sometimes a quick role-play with a teammate can sharpen your pitch immensely.

• Leverage Tools to Punch Above Your Weight: We talked about Skarbe as a way to automate tasks and act like an extra pair of hands in your sales process. Whether it’s Skarbe or another solution, don’t shy away from using tools to amplify your efforts. Your time is your most precious asset as a founder. Use technology to reclaim some of it. Imagine getting to focus on only the high-value conversations because software handles the busywork—that’s a huge win.

• Know When to Scale Beyond Founder-Led Sales: Keep an eye on the signals that it might be time to bring in additional help for sales. If your pipeline is overflowing and you can’t physically follow up with everyone, or if you’ve hit a consistent monthly revenue and have a repeatable process, it could be time to hire a salesperson or SDR to join you. The goal of founder-led sales is not to do it forever, but to do it until you’ve got a playbook that others can execute. Once you reach that stage, you can gradually step back from day-to-day selling (though you’ll always stay involved at some level, especially for big deals or strategy).

Finally, always remember why you’re doing this: to solve a meaningful problem for your customers and to build a sustainable business. Every cold call, every demo, every follow-up email is bringing you one step closer to that vision. There’s nothing more validating than a customer saying, “Your product has made my life better.” Founder-led sales is how you reach that moment early and often.

Alright, you’ve got this! We hope this expanded guide has given you practical tactics and the motivation to go out and make those sales. It’s a challenging road, but armed with the right frameworks (and maybe a trusty sidekick like Skarbe to help), you can master founder-led sales and set your startup on the path to success.