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Pre-Seed stage founders (typically the CEO) own the sales function. With lean teams consisting of just founders and a few engineers, hiring a dedicated salesperson rarely makes economic sense. More importantly, founders need constant contact with users and customers to discover product-market fit. Your initial hypothesis and understanding of the problem, market, and product are essential in driving sales efforts.
Don’t worry about not knowing how to sell at this stage—focus on understanding your customer. Spending hours planning target markets, messaging frameworks, or elaborate sales processes is a distraction at this stage. Instead, keep it simple: talk to users and prospective customers relentlessly, rank your hypotheses, and prove them right or wrong quickly.
Your primary job is to understand customer needs and steer the product toward maximum revenue potential. This requires continuous engagement with both users of your open source project and potential commercial customers.
Talk to customers and users constantly. They provide the insights that inform product development decisions. Building in isolation is one of the most dangerous mistakes pre-seed companies make. Potential customers don't buy features—they buy solutions to their most pressing problems. Focus on the heaviest users of your open source project, as their needs often represent the most valuable commercial opportunities.
Avoid the consultant trap. While industry experts can supplement user feedback, generalist consultants cannot replace direct customer conversations. Agencies typically follow rigid internal methodologies to produce generic deliverables that aren't useful for the highly iterative nature of early-stage product development. You need the real-time feedback loop that only comes from talking directly with prospective customers.
Build brand awareness through active participation in relevant discussions on platforms like Hacker News, LinkedIn, Reddit, and industry-specific forums. This engagement serves two purposes: it identifies potential customers and heavy users, and it helps you understand the problems they're trying to solve.
Focus on engaging directly with individuals rather than broadcasting marketing messages. The goal is understanding their problems and how your solution might address them. When engaging potential customers, focus on understanding their current state and pain points:
Follow up with clarifying questions: "Can you tell me more about that?" or "What do you mean by that?" These conversations should be about understanding problems, not showcasing solutions.
When prospects reach out before your commercial product is ready, treat these as discovery opportunities, not traditional sales calls. Your approach should focus on understanding their needs while positioning yourself as a potential solution.
Focus on understanding customer needs during early discovery calls. What caused them to reach out? What have they tried internally? What other solutions are they evaluating? Are they facing current production problems or anticipating future issues?
Use a qualification framework like BANT to assess whether prospects have: