Zero to $1M: Winning early GTM!

September 14, 2024

Go-to-market

by Ana Leyva

Last Thursday September 5th, we hosted our first Zero to $1M: Winning Early GTM summit focused on supporting early-stage founders in their journey to master founder-led sales and founder-led growth.

We opened the day with an invitation for the early-stage founders in attendance to think of the conference as their personal sales kickoff (SKO). SKOs are strategic meetings at established enterprise companies that usually take place at the beginning of the year to reveal the company goals, celebrate successes and recognize and reward top team members. These are very high energy gatherings, where everybody takes part.

As we planned the conference, we knew we wanted founders to treat the day as their personal SKOs. The early days of a startup can be so lonely and scary. Early-stage founders struggle to navigate the intimidating world of sales and we organized this conference for the very purpose of bringing founders together to learn, share best practices, and drum up the courage to crush founder-led sales and growth.

We had a full house throughout the day with amazing energy from both speakers and founders.

Our morning sessions were filled with personal stories, learnings and mistakes from the founder-led sales/growth journeys of Tracy Young, Jo Phillips, Jon Noronha, and Sam Adeyemo. We also had a session on how to cultivate a winning sales mindset (especially relevant for technical founders who have never done sales) led by the amazing Jason Ferguson!

Before we broke for lunch, we had a special surprise: we gifted Rose Punkunus of Sudozi (Pear portfolio company) their very first gong!

Before unveiling our surprise, we explained the 4 stages that we walk our founders through in our hands-on GTM support at Pear (outlined below) and then announced that Sudozi would receive a Gong on stage as we celebrated Rose’s growth and “graduation” from the FLS stage and on to the expansion stage.

We are so proud of Sudozi’s progress and know they are just getting started. We were thrilled to see Rose hit the Gong for the first time on our Zero to $1M stage!

In the afternoon, we designed a “Choose your own adventure” program where founders could attend breakout sessions that were most relevant to their needs and stages. We had sessions around pipeline management, pricing strategies, selling to developers, customer success fundamentals, and AI and the future of the GTM tech stack.

We closed the day with a fireside chat with the two-time unicorn founder Sanjit Biswas, known for his work at Meraki (which was sold to Cisco for $1.2 billion in 2012) and Samsara (NYSE: IOT, $26B+ market cap). Sanjit walked us through his journey in transitioning from PhD research to becoming a successful entrepreneur in the tech world, focusing on how he learned sales and how he approached sales-led and product-led growth at Meraki and Samsara.

Thank you to all the speakers for being so generous with your time and for filling the day with rich insights and inspiration for the early-stage founders in attendance. Tracy Young Joseph Elias Phillips Jon Noronha Samuel Adeyemo Jason Ferguson Stevie Case Armando Mann Rosie Roca Rich Liu Josh Greene Nelson Bostrom Elaine Zelby Amanda Kahlow Everett Berry Jessica Ko Jessica Gilmartin 🔮 Sandy Mangat Zena Davé Zach Vidibor Kerry Wang Kyle Poyar Kathleen Estreich Keith Bender.

In the next few weeks, we will be sharing summaries and recordings of the talks from Zero to $1M: Winning Early GTM and link them here:

Stay tuned for more!

All in all, it was a 10/10 day! We’re overjoyed by the amazing feedback we’ve received from founders in attendance. A couple examples include:

We are inspired to continue to support founders in their early GTM efforts, and already can’t wait for next year’s Zero to $1M conference!

Last but definitely not least, we want to thank our sponsors Cooley LLP, Banc of California, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Remote for supporting this initiative.

If you are interested in learning more about Pear’s GTM Practice, check out our page here.