This is why those first few deals you close as a SaaS founder might be lying to you.
Don’t get me wrong, early sales traction is important. It validates that you’re onto something. But those initial wins can be dangerously misleading if you’re not careful about what they truly represent.
The founder-led sales trap
You’re the founder. You’re passionate about the product, you have domain expertise and you’re out there closing deals. Maybe you hit five customers, then ten and you’re thinking you have momentum and it’s time to scale.
But founder-led sales is a completely different beast from what comes next.
Those early wins are often propped up by things that won’t scale.
When you’re the founder selling, you can promise one more feature and build it. You can discount heavily or give away free trials. You probably go way above and beyond on onboarding.
That flexibility is your superpower and your Achilles heel. Because when you hire your first Account Executive, they won’t have any of that. They can’t promise features or customise anything. And they can’t leverage your founder story.
The question becomes: are your customers buying your product, or are they buying you?
The £300k reality check
I recently did a GTM review (part of our pro bono review offering) with a C-Stage founder selling to big enterprise banks. We’re talking a £300K enterprise product here. He jumped on the call absolutely buzzing, telling me he was getting loads of momentum, that things were finally working after struggling to get traction.
Naturally, I dug deeper.
Turns out, that momentum was giving away free trials. When we looked at the data, not a single free trial had converted. But it felt like momentum because people were saying yes to trials. Another one booked in, another one lined up. The pipeline looked healthy on paper.
However, there’s a massive difference between someone taking a free trial and someone putting £300K on the table. Those weren’t real buying signals, they were misleading ones.
My advice to him was to slow down.
Make the sales process more repeatable. Run a proper sales process. Maybe start with a land-and-expand model and go in with a £50K proposal, something you can grow into. At least get the case study. Get real revenue momentum.
Because VCs love any form of revenue momentum, and it doesn’t matter if it’s not huge. What matters is that they see clients being signed on a repeatable basis, revenue coming in month after month. That’s what keeps everyone happy.
Why companies love buying from founders
When you rock up and say, “I’m Matthew, I’m the founder, I saw this problem when I worked at ACME Ltd X, so I built technology to solve it” that story resonates because its powerful and authentic. They love buying from a founder because:
- They know they’ll be part of the product roadmap. You’ll listen to their feedback. You’ll build features they need.
- They know you’ll go above and beyond. Because you want the case study, the reference, the validation.
- They trust your domain expertise. You’ve been in their shoes. You understand the problem intimately.
All of that is brilliant for getting those first deals done. But it’s hard to bottle up and make repeatable.
The network effect no one talks about
I speak to a lot of founders that have leveraged their networks without even realising it. You think it’s outbound, but it’s not cold outbound.
Maybe you asked in a founder community and someone connected you. Maybe you had credibility in the industry from your previous job. Maybe it was a VC introduction. The point is, there was already some level of trust or warmth there.
That’s fantastic for getting those early deals. But it’s not scalable. Your first sales hire won’t have access to your network. They won’t have your industry relationships. They’ll be starting from scratch.
How to spot the misleading signals
To understand what’s luck, what’s judgment, and what’s repeatable, this is what you need to do:
Be prescriptive about tracking
You need to know where opportunities came from and how you closed them.
- What kind of outbound was it?
- Did you send a cold email?
- Was it a VC connection?
- Did it come through a founder community?
- Was it your personal network?
Then be equally prescriptive about the rest of the sales process. Look for those little triggers around what made people buy from you.
Do post-sale case study calls
After you sign a customer, get on a call with them after a couple of months. Really drill into why they bought from you. This is critical.
What you’re listening for in those calls are the red flags:
- “I just really liked you”
- “You were really personable”
- “Your experience at [Previous Company] was impressive”
Those are signals that you’ve got some misleading traction. You want to hear about your product, not about you.
The role of a founder playbook
Most SaaS founders come from technical backgrounds, not commercial ones. You probably haven’t seen what good looks like from a sales perspective.
This is exactly why you need a founder playbook.
Document all the steps in your process to get a customer over the line:
- What’s your target company profile?
- What’s the qualification criteria?
- How do you run discovery, demos, and proposals?
Write it all down. This helps you avoid winging it. Without that process, prospects ask for features, you promise to build them, and then you’ve over-promised something that won’t be repeatable.
Learn more about how to create your first sales playbook here.
A good playbook also helps diagnose issues. If loads of people are asking for feature requests in the demo, you’re selling a tool, not a problem. Better discovery would reveal their one or two real problems.
Learn more about how to improve your discovery process here.
From scrappy to repeatable
It’s okay to be scrappy at the start. But once you’ve got those first 5-10 customers, there’s an inflection point.
Be critical. Look at why they bought:
- How did we get them in the pipeline?
- Where did they come from?
- How did we qualify them?
Have tough conversations. Get on the phone with early customers. Five or ten minutes each. Drill them on why they bought. You’re looking for over-reliance on the founder brand versus genuine product-market fit.
Document everything. When you’re ready to hire your first AE, you can say: “These first five came from my network. But these five? I sent LinkedIn messages focusing on these three things. Let’s test this.”
Use early traction as a growth platform
Early sales traction is validating and exciting. But don’t let it fool you into thinking you’ve cracked repeatability because those first wins are often built on things that won’t scale
The goal is to transition from founder-led sales to product-led sales.
That’s when you know you’ve got something repeatable.
So be scrappy with those first 10 customers. Test things but then be brutally honest about why people bought and then build that playbook.
Because the last thing you want is to hire your first AE only to discover that what worked for you won’t work for them. That’s an expensive lesson and one you can avoid by being more critical about your early traction now.
Author Bio: Matthew Codd
Matthew has 15 years of commercial leadership experience, helping VC-backed B2B technology companies scale revenue and transition from founder-led sales.
He now uses his experience to help early-stage start-ups with GTM expertise, sales best practice, and hiring insights.
Matthew co-founded Cosmic Partners in 2022, a SaaS sales recruitment specialists for VC backed B2B tech companies.
