This Y Combinator talk emphasizes the crucial role of founders in securing initial customers. It advocates for "doing things that don't scale," focusing on direct sales outreach—primarily email—to easily acquired customers, particularly within the startup ecosystem. The speaker stresses the importance of charging for the product, tracking sales funnel metrics (using a CRM), and working backward from sales goals to determine necessary outreach volume. He cautions against prematurely assuming sales aren't working due to insufficient data and provides examples of successful early-stage sales strategies. I hope you've read this article or this essay, the most important essay ever written about the very early stage of startups is do things that don't scale by Paul Graham. Paul is the co-founder of y-commner. He published this essay about the early days of Airbnb Airbnb is perhaps the best example of a successful YC company who got their feet off the ground. This way many founders who never worked for a startup or an early stage company incorrectly believe that all you need to succeed is a good product, and growth will take care of itself. This is not the case. The truth is that good product is very rarely built in isolation, but together with your customers.01:23And as a result, it's not actually that good when you show it to your first customers. Set this Another way, startups don't take off by themselves. Startup takes off because founders make them take off, and you have to manually recruit your customers.01:36It's not enough to push a button on an advertising network. This is uncomfortable, and founders continuously find many ways to avoid doing this. The most common way is believing that you can recruit people by just writing more code or doing more work on your machine or your robot or whatever you're building. It's not just knowing exactly how to do sales in theory, but actually doing it and actually wanting to succeed. Another great visualization is what's called a startup curve. This was initially drawn by YC Found program and then labeled by Trevor Blackwell, And you've probably seen this curve before.02:26Most companies go through something like this. It's kind of like a timeline for startups Here's how it goes. First you launch these days, most companies don't launch on TechCrunch but probably on product hunt or hacker news or some other internet board.02:40The launch energy that you get from this launch eventually starts wearing off as early adopters are looking out for something new. If you don't have instant high retention, nobody does for what you are building then you'll enter the through of sorrow.02:54This can take a long time and many companies die during this stage. They just give up and don't move fast enough with testing new things. Some startups do move fast enough and release new improvements of their product. They'll listen to users and they improve.03:08Many still don't get anywhere further and becomes victims of the crash of ineptitude. It's the founders to stay the course and don't give up. That reaches the wiggles of false hope and eventually the promised land of crack market fit the learnings They don't understand what the problem is. You don't know how to sell unless you know your customers, two learning how to do sales actually gives you full control of your destiny as a startup just like you can't outsource engineering sales has to be part of the DNA of the founders. Sometimes you just have to learn it as a result. You should not hire a sales team until you know how to do sales yourself. only then will you know what good looks like. You also can't do sales if you practice bad and you won't know if the product is bad unless you've had some effort in trying to sell it first. If you don't know how to sell, don't worry you, You can learn it's probably the easiest job to learn in startup. If you know the problem you're solving, if you know you're product intimately, if you know the market, you are an expert in the eyes of the customer, they will want to hear what you have to say. Finally, a love for solving customer problems is really infectious. If you're really passionate about solving this problem they will be able to tell if you don't believe me here are some examples of founders who took on the sales job and learned to get really good at it. This segment analyzes real-world examples from successful startups like Amplitude, Stripe, and Front, demonstrating how they initially leveraged "app-on" sales emails and direct outreach to acquire their first customers. It contrasts this approach with later-stage scalable growth strategies like SEO and SEM, highlighting the importance of starting with direct, personal engagement to learn from early adopters and adapt the product before scaling. The speaker emphasizes the crucial role of founders in conducting demos, asking insightful questions, and personally closing initial deals, providing actionable advice and dispelling common misconceptions about outsourcing sales too early. This segment focuses on the importance of working backward from sales goals and tracking conversion rates at each stage of the sales funnel. It uses examples to illustrate how insufficient outreach can lead to inaccurate conclusions about sales effectiveness. The speaker stresses the need for data-driven decision-making and the use of CRM software to track key metrics, emphasizing that sales is a numbers game and that successful startups understand and internalize this. This segment presents a practical example of successful early-stage sales, detailing how the Brex founders acquired their first ten customers. It analyzes their email outreach strategy, highlighting its effectiveness despite being slightly too long, and provides actionable advice on crafting concise and impactful sales emails. The speaker emphasizes brevity, clarity, and addressing the customer's specific problems.