Our Zero to $1M conference wouldn’t have been complete without a session on how AI is changing the go-to-market (GTM) landscape. We recruited a panel that included seasoned entrepreneurs like Amanda Kahlow (6Sense and 1mind), Zach Vidibor (Octave) and Elaine Zelby (Tofu) and industry experts like Everett Berry (Clay) and our very own Kathleen Estreich (Pear VC). Our panelists universally agreed that AI-driven transformations in GTM will redefine team dynamics, optimize workflows, and unlock efficiencies previously unimaginable. Here, we distill some of the key takeaways from their conversation (scroll for the recording of their full convo!)!
Reshaping Roles and Workflows
Elaine Zelby of Tofu highlighted how AI can significantly reduce operational overhead, allowing companies to accomplish more with fewer people. Amanda Kahlow agreed emphatically as she introduced Mindy AI to discuss how AI tools are beginning to take on roles traditionally held by humans, thereby offering customers immediate access to information and engagement, and improving the software-buying experience.
Human + AI
While AI tools can perform arduous tasks much faster than humans, the panel stressed the importance of retaining the ‘human touch’ in GTM. Zach Vidibor from Octave expressed the critical importance of having empathetic folks in customer-facing roles who can deeply understand and address customer needs. In fact, the panel seemed to come to consensus that leveraging AI for data analysis while maintaining genuine human interactions could be the key differentiator for scaling startups.
Strategic Implementation of AI
For AI tools to be effective, they must be strategically integrated within a company’s GTM strategy. Everett Berry from Clay recommended supporting creative and strategic thinking with robust data management to ensure AI tools are effectively utilized to maximize ROI. Amanda Kahlow discussed the necessity of maintaining and updating data fed to AI tools to prevent reliance on outdated information.
In short, several actionable insights emerged for early-stage founders considering AI adoption within their GTM efforts:
1. Start with Clear Goals: Define a specific area within your operations where AI could make a significant impact. Consider starting with tasks that are time-consuming and mundane yet critical to GTM operations.
2. Leverage AI to Enhance Creativity: Marrying AI’s processing power with creative strategies can yield unparalleled efficiencies, making it immensely valuable to scaling startups.
3. Maintain Human Empathy: Ensure your human teams are empowered to do what they do best while AI handles the bulk of data-driven decision-making.
4. Iterate and Experiment: AI tools are evolving. Be prepared to experiment and iterate on strategy frequently to remain at the forefront of these technological advances.
AI is reshaping the sales and marketing landscape in real-time, offering startup founders potent tools to accelerate growth. By focusing on authentic, strategic, and thoughtful AI integration, early-stage companies can not only streamline their operations but also elevate their market positioning in this new digital frontier. As the panel beautifully encapsulated, the future of GTM lies in the harmonious blend of AI capabilities and human empathy. We’re excited to see what the future holds!
Achieving rapid growth and successful product-market fit can be a maze filled with daunting challenges. For early-stage founders, embarking on this journey requires not only a solid idea but the perseverance to continually adapt and learn. The Gamma.app team has walked this arduous path from obscurity to 25 million users, and their inspirational story shared by Jon Noronha, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, at our Zero to $1M conference should be a beacon of hope to all founders currently in the trenches.
Here are the key takeaways early stage founders can learn from Jon’s presentation:
Choose the Right Problem
Before diving into solution development, Gamma founders pondered a fundamental question: What problem were they truly passionate about and uniquely suited to solve? As they reflected, the process of creating and delivering presentations—a near-universal business challenge– stuck out to them. They considered it in light of all the pros AND cons and chose to pursue it because of the potential impact their product could have. For all early-stage founders, it’s crucial to love the problem you’re solving enough to be passionate about it for a decade plus of company building! And it’s critical to believe that you’re uniquely positioned to build that tool. Gamma founders were product leaders and they wanted to build a tool that would thrive via a PLG strategy to growth, to specifically play to their strengths. This is a great example of considering your fit to 1) build the tool and 2) build the GTM model to get that tool out in the market. Choose challenges that your team is inherently equipped to solve well. Build on those core competencies as you scale.
Lead with Customer Motivation
One of the things that I loved most about Jon’s growth story was how he managed early customer onboarding, made it a point to spend time going through customer support tickets, and also was intentional about getting that customer feedback back to his team at Gamma. Jon shared:
“I was relentless about sharing [customer feedback with our team]… I made sure that every week our team heard five or 10 positive things that were going well. And we were getting some diehard fans out of this. We had a small number of true believers. And when I say a small number, I think like maybe 10 to 15 people who really got it and really believed and were telling their friends. Nothing to really write home about, but still it felt good to us!”
You can’t overestimate the importance of driving this motivation for your team, especially in the early days before you’ve really gotten to PMF!
Seize Luck and Keep it Real With Your Team
After some time of slow traction, the Gamma team ended up getting to a point of “existential dread.” The world was changing fast, with the economy going into a downturn and fundraising market drying up. Yet, amidst investor skepticism and financial pressures, the Gamma team had to take a big leap of faith in order to chart their course forward. They decided to integrate AI to enhance presentation design, tapping into a burgeoning trend, unveiling features that resonated and added unparalleled value to our users’ experiences. They would not have been positioned well to take advantage of the opportunity had they not invested so heavily in customer experience and awareness. What gave Jon and his team the confidence to take this big leap amidst so much uncertainty was the foundation he’d built with users and his team. He shared,
“What’s interesting is this period of time of existential angst was probably the most productive and fun part of the whole experience of working on the company. I think there is a lesson there about being candid with your team about when it’s time to put it all on the line, I think it’s a card you can only play so many times and we had to play it, we had no choice. So we had a huge blitz of development.”
Jon and the rest of Gamma leadership had built enough trust with his team and customers to seize the opportunity AI presented, and this ended up being a pivotal step in them finding viral growth.
Gamma Thrives
Entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint. Gamma’s story highlights the importance of starting out strategically, remaining adaptable, and fostering a relentless spirit. By embracing setbacks as stepping stones and using them as learning moments, Gamma’s team navigated the complex early days of growth and product development. We are so grateful Jon joined us at Zero to $1M to share their inspiring story!
You can watch Jon’s entire presentation here:
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:
In the challenging world of startups, the path to success can often seem shrouded in mystery and uncertainty, especially when it comes to mastering sales and growth. However, with the right mindset, even early-stage founders without a sales background can become the sales leaders their orgs need. In his inspiring session at our Zero to $1M conference, Jason Ferguson shared invaluable lessons on establishing a winning sales mindset, crucial for any founder aiming to go the distance.
The Power of Pathological Optimism
Even when you’re doing well, a large part of navigating sales is dealing with rejection. Founders new to sales often get deterred and discouraged too quickly because the rejection can feel like a shock to the system! A critical part of learning to persevere is embracing “Pathological Optimism.” Jason shared how he first became a pathological optimist after a few early setbacks. Growing up with dreams of becoming an NFL player, he faced numerous challenges, from physical limitations to an inability to participate in fall recruitment. His unwavering belief in the possibility of good, even in the face of adversity, enabled him to seize an opportunity to meet the head coach of the University of Hawaii when things seemed most bleak. His ability to see and seize the opportunity allowed him to succeed against the horrible odds he was facing. For founders, adopting pathological optimism means seeing potential in every engagement and maintaining resilience in the face of constant rejection. Every founder must become a pathological optimist!
Embracing Radical Accountability
A cornerstone of having the right sales mindset is radical accountability—owning results and outcomes, regardless of external circumstances. For founders, this means looking inward for solutions and taking proactive steps to close gaps, rather than attributing failures to external factors. Adopting this approach fosters creativity and drives impactful action, positioning the company for sustainable growth no matter what challenges arise.
Authenticity as a Sales Superpower
Jason underscored the incredible power of authenticity in sales. Having overcome athletic challenges and personal demons, Jason’s personal experiences shaped his approach to his professional challenges. It took him years, but eventually he realized he was at his best when he brought his full self to work and learned first-hand that authenticity pays off.
Sales is often misunderstood, perceived as a field dominated by specific personality types. Yet, as Jason passionately conveyed, sales is for everyone willing to adopt the right mindset. The heart of successful selling lies not in adhering to stereotypes but in embracing an attitude of optimism, persistence, and authenticity. This is especially important for founders who might feel out of their depth in sales.
Real success begins when founders embrace their unique traits and principles, transforming them into distinctive selling strengths. By committing to authenticity, founders will forge genuine connections with their target buyers, employees, investors and more. Authenticity is a precious flywheel with endless benefits!
A Call to Action for Founders
Establishing the right mindset is foundational to achieving sales and growth success as an early-stage founder. By cultivating optimism, embracing accountability, and leading with authenticity, founders can confidently navigate the complexities of selling and growth.
Remember, your mindset is the key FIRST step you need to take to win in sales and marketing. Engage with passion, act with intention, and lead with your true self. The journey from zero to success is yours to embrace.
You can watch Jason’s entire presentation here:
Thank you to Jason, for being such an inspiration to us and to founders everywhere!
Looking Ahead
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:
Sales—it’s a word that often sends shivers down the spine of many early-stage founders. With all the complexities involved in strategic sales, mastering sales can feel downright daunting. However, as Tracy Young’s journey with founder-led sales at PlanGrid demonstrates, effective sales techniques can be learned and applied, even if you’re starting with zero sales experience. During her keynote at Zero to $1M, Tracy gave founders in the audience a comprehensive guide to best practices and a dose of inspiration to help them see that they, too, can master the art of selling.
Her top insights are summarized below:
From $0 to $5 Million without a Sales Team: Nailing Founder Led Sales
Tracy Young didn’t start with a robust sales team or even a deep understanding of how to run one. Instead, her initial success at PlanGrid was driven by solving real problems for real people. Dealing directly with customers—from project engineers to superintendents—helped PlanGrid understand their market’s needs and show that their product genuinely addressed their core concerns.
Focus on Growth Levers
Tracy shared that it’s important to seek out “growth levers” by slicing your market in various ways to identify which areas are ripe for investment and growth. Using this approach, Tracy was able to discover what was driving growth for her customers and that helped her narrow her focus and pitch to attain rapid growth in the early days. In just one year, PlanGrid expanded from five to fifty hospitals, proving the efficacy of strategically leveraging growth opportunities.
Grassroots to Enterprise: Build from the Ground Up
As always, in sales you have to narrow in before you go broad. In the early days, PlanGrid aimed at solving individual project-level problems, which eventually opened the door to larger, enterprise-level deals. The lesson here? Scaling starts with small, targeted wins that build credibility and customer base. When PlanGrid finally landed enterprise deals, selling a thousand licenses at once became easier than selling five at a time.
Focus on Customer Success from Day One
Achieving high net retention rates was paramount from even the earliest days at PlanGrid. For every dollar sold one year, PlanGrid could sell an additional $0.30 the next year—showing the importance of keeping existing customers satisfied and engaged.
Show up with Determination and Expertise
Tracy emphasized three key traits for successful founder-led sales: determination, domain expertise, and the ability to sell. She shared a powerful message: at least one founder must embrace the role of sales. And not just partially. This founder must fully embrace sales with determination and a can-do mentality in order to go the distance.
Creative, Low-Cost Marketing: Blueprint Suits and Donut Boxes
In the early days of scrappy marketing budgets, you can still stand out by employing creative tactics. For Tracy, that meant commissioning local fashion students to make blueprint suits in order to create a memorable presence at conferences. Another clever tactic involved delivering donut boxes with a card promising better food options for future meetings. These personal touches and human interactions stood out to her early adopters, and yielded significant ROI.
Building Trust and Belief in Your Product
Tracy highlighted a crucial aspect of selling: belief in your product. She advised founders to build something people want and to believe in the power of their product. Authenticity resonates with potential customers—they can tell if you genuinely believe in what you are selling or if you’re trying to offload something subpar.
The Resource You Can’t Waste: Time
Time is the one resource founders can’t afford to waste. Tracy emphasized creating efficiencies, whether through product development or customer interactions. Listen more than you speak, answer directly, and always know the next steps before leaving a meeting.
Championing Your Customer’s Needs
What stood out perhaps most profoundly from Tracy’s talk was her sincere commitment to her customers—the ones who “took showers at night.” The best founders are champions for their customers, solving real problems, and providing tangible solutions and aligning their customers’ success, motivations and aspirations with their own.
Conclusion: Believe in Your Journey
Learning to sell is a journey every founder must embark on. Tracy Young’s story is a testament to what can be achieved through determination, innovation, and an unwavering belief in your product. Take these insights, apply them to your venture, and remember: you can learn to sell, and you can achieve remarkable growth before hiring in GTM.
Stay tuned for more stories and insights from Zero to $1M: Winning Early GTM as we continue to share the strategies our amazing speakers shared to drive startup growth.
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:
Tracy Young is the co-founder and CEO of TigerEye.Tracy is an experienced company leader with a successful track record in scaling private enterprise technology companies. Previously, she co-founded and served as CEO of PlanGrid, the leader in construction productivity software that Autodesk acquired for $875 million in 2018. During this time, Tracy led the company through years of massive growth — from inception to product-market fit, and from $0 to $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) — and drove teams to execute on strategic business initiatives.
In 2018 Tracy was recognized by Forbes’ Top 50 Women in Tech and named a Top 50 SaaS CEO by the SaaS Report. She has previously spoken at TEDWomen 2020, Techonomy, Salesforce’s Dreamforce and SaaStr.
Young was previously a visiting partner at Y Combinator (Winter 2020, 2021). She holds a B.S. in construction engineering management from California State University, Sacramento.
immi, a healthy ramen company that Pear first backed in their pre-seed round, has been experiencing rapid brand growth lately. But while a few of their marketing successes have been a result of good luck (like Usher’s talent agency reaching out after seeing an immi-branded truck in NYC), most of their success stems from their experimental approach to marketing.
The immi team understands that there is no silver bullet when it comes to brand building, and there is no rule book on creating a halo effect, particularly when it comes to growing an organic social audience. Nevertheless, the team at immi has cultivated brand loyalty and tremendous growth in the last two years.
I sat down to chat with immi’s co-founder (and fun fact: former Pear team member!) Kevin Lee about how immi grew an audience for healthy ramen from scratch — and in the early days, with zero marketing budget.
Here are the key takeaways in Kevin’s own words (this post has been edited for brevity):
In the early days, you have to do things that don’t scale.
During the R&D phase, we found a bot online that would scrape all of Reddit and send a Slack notification when certain keywords were mentioned. We indexed for keywords like “low carb ramen”, “healthy ramen”, “instant ramen alternatives”, etc. I was looking at these comments and posts seven days a week, figuring out a smart way to insert ourselves into the conversation.
There was no product yet, just a Shopify landing page. But with a well-placed, thoughtful comment, you could drive 500 email signups with one comment. Like any startup, we were trying to acquire email leads as cost-efficiently and quickly as possible without a marketing budget. We also used some Meta ad credits to test some paid lead ad forms on Meta, which I’d say generated much higher quality leads four years ago than they do today.
We got benchmark data to estimate the avg. open rate, click through rate, AOV, and conversion for a waitlist email subscriber and were able to back into the cost per lead for an e-mail in order to break even on our launch.
Once we figured out that figure, we started scaling our organic and paid efforts to acquire emails.
Once someone got on our email list, we had an email flow that we wanted to feel super authentic. We used gifs of ourselves goofing off in the kitchen… things that reminded customers that we’re a homegrown upstart brand. We also made a private Facebook community where we shared the behind-the-scenes of building the company and gradually turned members into loyal immi evangelists. It was important to us to build a loyal, thriving community from the start and we knew higher engagement would result in higher conversion rates.
Our thesis panned almost exactly to the tee and in our first month of launch, we generated multiple six figures of revenue from our e-mail waitlist without spending any marketing dollars.
Gif from the immi email flow
Approach your marketing like a product manager would.
My co-founder and I worked as PMs in tech for the past decade, so we naturally applied the PM framework to marketing: creating a marketing icebox and running sprint planning. The icebox is a backlog of growth ideas that anyone in the org can add to. You have to add context and prioritization from the lens of three variables: impact, urgency, and ease. You have story points, which is an estimate of how many days it will take to actually accomplish this task.
A marketing sprint planning session
We do sprint planning two times a month. We’ll review the top priority ideas and each person will then assign themselves to sprint items. At the end of the sprint, we run a retrospective to report on results of each experiment and plan for the next sprint. Standard product management stuff.
The immi team experimented with a lot of ideas, like handing out ramen from a branded truck in Times Square
Run your marketing like a writers room.
We run additional creative sprints that everyone across the immi team is welcome to join. Each person has to come up with 3-5 novel or unique ad concepts and they’re responsible for scripting out the ad copy and video / image scenes.
We also created a writers room inspired by comedy and TV series writers who work on short deadlines. We pick themes for each writer’s room i.e. Mothers Day, ideas are thrown out rapidly and just as quickly shut down. You can’t criticize the person, only the idea because you don’t want people to clam up over time. When people like an idea, we jot it down, expand on it, iterate on dozens of variations until we agree on the final concept, and then we test it out. We do this every other week.
Organic media success is impossible to quantify, but there’s power in iteration and experimentation.
One idea that spun out of our writers room is a TikTok series called Ramen on the Street. Our in-house TikTok strategist dresses in an immi ramen packet costume and roams around NYC interviewing people with deep life questions to draw out answers that make you feel good as a viewer. The overarching idea was based on our internal tagline at immi: ramen that makes you feel good. A good brand moves beyond selling a product to selling a feeling (and ultimately, an identity). We want people to feel good from our content and associate that feeling with our product.
It took us nine months to iterate into a repeatable series. Nine months of zero traction and zero engagement was tough for the team. It was like running another startup within the startup. But as long as you’re iterating on your learnings and running experiments, you’re probably going to find some repeatable angle over time.
An example of our TikTok team’s experiment was quite literally rubbing a light layer of Vaseline on the camera lens. It creates a blur effect that makes the video feel a little bit more organic, and believe it or not, that was one of the catalysts to our videos taking off.
An immi creator in a ramen costume
As a founder, you have to find the balance between stubbornness vs. grit. I’m not going to say we weren’t lucky, but I do believe our team did a great job of constantly experimenting and iterating until we found success.
Now we’re consistently doing 10-20 million organic views per month, and we’re also able to iterate on that content. We’re trying CTA’s at the end of videos to drive people into retail stores. We’re also starting to test content where we’re interviewing people in the ramen aisle of grocery stores where immi is visible.
Over time, you really want to build a media platform that is driving organic traffic to you instead of spending all your money on paid ads. There’s magic in this type of marketing. It’s hard to quantify the magic, because when you quantify the magic, the magic disappears. We’re very data oriented, don’t get me wrong, but I think these are the exceptions you have to make.
Focus on one thing at a time. When it reaches saturation, expand.
Through the lifespan of immi, we’ve always tried to focus on one thing at a time. First, it was driving people into our email flow. Then we focused on making Meta ads work. No shiny object syndrome. We pick one, get early signs of channel market fit, and triple down. Many founders try to spread themselves across 10 different channels when the reality is that you only need one at a time to really scale up until you hit a breaking point. When you hit saturation, broaden to a new channel.
Immi team serving ramen to trade show attendees
Thank you to Kevin for sharing these insights! To learn more about immi please visit them online or follow them on TikTok. You can find immi in Whole Foods, Target, Sprouts, HEB, GNC, and more.
immi’s media machine has helped them get interest (and investment) from celebrities like Usher, Kygo, Apolo Ohno, Naomi Osaka, a TikTok duet from Lizzo, a partnership for Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and more. For more founder learnings, check out the Pear Almanac.
As a member of the Talent team at Pear, one of my primary responsibilities is assisting early-stage founders with their first hires. Each month, we receive dozens of inquiries from founders about how to best structure equity compensation for their first hires. Although there is a wealth of information available on this topic, we have yet to find a resource that effectively answers the crucial question:
How much equity should I grant my first employees?
In this post, we aim to demystify the decision-making process around equity grants for early employees and provide a practical, transparent approach for founders to use.
Summary
Benchmarking data, the most common approach founders use to determine equity compensation, is inherently flawed. It often relies on a small data set, leading to comparisons with only a few data points. It also fails to capture context, reducing the decision to a handful of variables like role, level, funding, valuation, and team size, resulting in a one-size-fits-all approach. While benchmarking data can be a helpful tool to understand the competitiveness of an offer and provide another data point to aid your decision-making, we find it is often inaccurate, especially for early-stage equity data.
To make it easier for founders, we’ve developed our own approach to equity management for early employees that captures many of the nuances missed by other methods. We refer to this process as “building an equity budget.”
Core Inputs
To start building your equity budget, you’ll need to answer the following questions:
Equity Set Aside: How much equity have you set aside for employees in your most recent raise?
Hiring Plan: How many people do you plan to hire between now and your next raise? This can be a rough estimate, but the more accurate you are here, the more precise the budget.
Position Breakdown: What specific positions are you hiring for, broken down by role type (technical or non-technical) and seniority level (senior, mid, or junior)?*
*The simplicity in role definition and leveling is intentional. We believe that a narrow and flat organizational structure is best suited for companies at an early stage.
Important Definitions & Concepts
Options Pool or Employee Equity Set Aside
It’s common for early-stage companies to set aside about 10% of shares for their employees during the fundraising process. Your employee options pool (ESOP) represents the maximum percentage of new ownership, or the number of shares, you can issue via new hire grants or refreshers to new or existing hires without further dilution. While the exact percentage you set aside will vary based on agreements with your investors, once you decide on an amount, you should avoid exceeding it.
If you haven’t raised a priced round, we suggest setting aside a certain amount of equity that functions as an ESOP, even if it’s not technically written into your agreement.
You should view your options pool as your maximum, not target, spend. Similar to managing cash burn, your goal isn’t to spend this down to zero.
We recommend setting aside a percentage of your options pool as a buffer, typically between 25-35% of the total pool. This ensures you don’t exceed your allocated resources and provides flexibility if you need to hire more aggressively or at a higher seniority level than initially planned.
Equity Allocation Guidelines: Multipliers, Premiums, and Discounts
When it comes to determining equity grants for your early-stage employees, it’s crucial to navigate through a landscape of multipliers, premiums, and discounts. Let’s break down these guidelines:
Timing Matters: Your earliest hires deserve a larger slice of the equity pie. As you bring on subsequent team members, it’s common for their equity to decrease by 20-50% with each new addition.
Technical vs. Non-Technical: Technical hires often command larger equity packages compared to their non-technical counterparts. Typically, equity packages for non-technical hires are discounted by 50% compared to their technical peers.
Junior vs Senior. Senior hires should receive more substantial equity grants compared to junior-level hires. As a rule of thumb, if equity for a junior-level hire is 1x, a mid-level hire should be 5x, and a senior hire 10x.
While these guidelines offer valuable insights, every startup is unique. You should feel empowered to tailor how you allocate equity to suit your company’s specific needs and values, but be mindful that deviations can significantly impact your equity budget.
How it works
To establish a starting point for equity grants, we recommend using 0.75% as the “baseline grant” for your first hire. This percentage represents the equity grant for a technical, mid-level employee and serves as a reference point for your future calculations. A .75% equity grant for a mid-level technical hire is consistent with market trends, based on real offers from our founders and further validated by commonly used benchmarking data.
Using the the table below, we now have the information we need to determine what size grant each hire would receive:
Buffer
25%
Discount per Hire
20%
Role Multiplier
-Technical
100%
-Non-Technical
50%
Level Multiplier
-Senior
200%
-Mid
100%
-Junior
20%
All values can be changed to align with founder preferences. However, the numbers above are considered standard and we recommend you start with similar numbers even if you end up changing them later.
Let’s assume you plan on making 3 hires in your first 6 months after raising your Seed round.
Hire #1: Senior Technical
Hire #2: Senior Technical
Hire #3: Mid Non-Technical
Using the tables below, you can easily calculate what your equity spend would be in your first 6 months.
Equity for Hire #1: Senior Technical
Role
Level
% After Discount
Baseline Grant #1
Role Multiplier
Level Multiplier
Equity Grant
Technical
Senior
100%
.75
100%
200%
1.50%
Technical
Mid
100%
.75
100%
100%
0.75%
Technical
Junior
100%
.75
100%
20%
0.15%
Non-Technical
Senior
100%
.75
50%
200%
0.75%
Non-Technical
Mid
100%
.75
50%
100%
0.38%
Non-Technical
Junior
100%
.75
50%
20%
0.08%
Equity for Hire #2: Senior Technical
Role
Level
% Post Hire Discount
Baseline Grant #2
Role Multiplier
Level Multiplier
Equity Grant
Technical
Senior
80%
.60
100%
200%
1.20%
Technical
Mid
80%
.60
100%
100%
0.60%
Technical
Junior
80%
.60
100%
20%
0.12%
Non-Technical
Senior
80%
.60
50%
200%
0.60%
Non-Technical
Mid
80%
.60
50%
100%
0.30%
Non-Technical
Junior
80%
.60
50%
20%
0.06%
Equity for hire #3: Mid Non-Technical
Role
Level
% Post Hire Discount
Baseline Grant #3
Role Multiplier
Level Multiplier
Equity Grant
Technical
Senior
64%
.48
100%
200%
0.96%
Technical
Mid
64%
.48
100%
100%
0.48%
Technical
Junior
64%
.48
100%
20%
0.10%
Non-Technical
Senior
64%
.48
.50%
200%
0.48%
Non-Technical
Mid
64%
.48
50%
100%
0.24%
Non-Technical
Junior
64%
.48
50%
20%
0.05%
Your total equity spend would be 2.94% which leaves you with a little over 60% of your available equity pool left to spend on your remaining hires.
Hire
Role
Level
Grant
#1
Technical
Senior
1.50%
#2
Technical
Senior
1.20%
#3
Non-Technical
Mid
0.24%
Total
2.94%
Remaining
4.56%
Startup Equity Calculator for Early Hires
To help illustrate this approach even more clearly, we’ve built acalculatoryou can use to perform this exercise on your own.
Final Notes
For growing companies, the primary constraints on equity grants are the size of the options pool set aside for employees and the number of hires a company plans to make. For example, if Company A plans to hire 10 employees and Company B plans to hire 20, but both have the same size options pool, Company B will have less equity to allocate per employee.
Companies with significant hiring plans (greater than 10 hires) should establish a minimum baseline for equity grants. This approach is reflected in the “Min Baseline Equity” section of our calculator. It ensures that equity grants do not fall below a certain threshold, counteracting the rapid decrease in baseline equity from Hire 1 (0.75%) to Hire 10 (0.10%). The figures shown in the example above assume a 20% decrease in the baseline equity grant with each subsequent hire.
Upon reaching Series A, companies often move from the “Discount Per Hire %” approach to a standardized system where all employees in the same role and level receive equal equity grants. For Series A companies, we suggest resetting the baseline equity grant for a mid-level technical hire to 0.075%.
Many candidates at this stage expect grants that fall outside typical ranges. Running candidates through this exercise can provide them with the context needed to better understand the size of their grant.
Most importantly, we recommend doing whatever is necessary to close the right talent, flexing where needed to hire outlier candidates. This post about Minimum Fundable Teams captures some of our thoughts on why the right team is so important.
We hope you found this resource helpful. Visit our Talent Services page to learn more about our team and the work we do to support founders.
As a technical founder, you’re no stranger to challenging assumptions and pushing boundaries. Yet, when it comes to sales, many technical founders fall prey to common myths and misconceptions about sales that can hinder their startup’s growth. Let’s debunk these myths and uncover the truth about sales:
1. Myth: A Good Product Will Sell Itself, so I don’t need to worry about sales: Especially from a technical point of view, it’s easy to believe that if you’ve built a great product, customers will come flocking. While a strong product is undoubtedly essential, it’s not enough to guarantee success. In reality, ideas are cheap, and execution is critical. Competitors will inevitably emerge, and without a solid sales strategy, your product will get lost in the noise– even if it’s better than the alternatives. Early sales are crucial for validating your idea, learning how to talk about it and gaining traction in the market.
2. Myth: I Can’t Sell Because I’m Not “Salesy”: Many technical founders shy away from sales, believing it’s a skill reserved for natural-born salespeople. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. In Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm,” he highlights the importance of early sales to tech enthusiasts – a group that technical founders are uniquely positioned to identify with and sell to. Your deep understanding of the product and its technical intricacies can be a powerful asset in connecting with early adopters. Sales isn’t about being pushy or overly charismatic; it’s about building relationships and solving problems.
3. Myth: Sales Is a Necessary Evil: Some technical founders view sales as a necessary evil – something to be delegated while they focus on building a product-centered company. However, the best businesses understand that success lies in being customer-centric from the get-go. Sales and technical teams should work hand in hand throughout the lifetime of the company, both driven by a shared commitment to delivering value to customers. Interweaving the shared success of both teams early on fosters collaboration and ensures that the customer remains at the heart of every decision. Ultimately, the most successful companies recognize and appreciate the unique contributions that both technical and sales teams bring to the table.
Technical founders must challenge traditional myths about the sales profession and recognize the pivotal role that sales will play in their startup’s success. A great product is just the beginning – it’s how you sell it that sets you apart. Embrace sales as a strategic imperative, leverage your technical expertise to connect with early adopters, and build a customer-centric organization from day one. By doing so, you’ll pave the way for sustainable growth and lasting success.
Want to know more about leading GTM as a technical founder? Check out our additional resources for technical founders here.
My role at Pear is to directly support pre-seed founders that participate in PearX with their hiring needs. PearX is our hands-on, 14-week bootcamp designed to position founders to raise seed rounds from top tier investors. We’re experts at helping companies raise this capital; over 90% of PearX companies go on to raise capital from top investors.
We have found, that at early stage, the four largest themes driving an investor’s decision to invest in a company are:
Market
Product
Traction
Team
To successfully raise capital, you need all four to be great OR one or two to be exceptional.
However, at pre-seed in particular, markets are difficult to size and product or traction are often still too early to measure with a high degree of conviction. For these reasons, investors will often place an outsized emphasis on the quality and completeness of the team when making an investment decision.
At Pear, we refer to the completeness of a team at this stage as Minimum Fundable Team or MFT.
Prior to raising a pre-seed or seed round, founders should ensure their MFT is a competitive advantage. We suggest that all founders ask the following three simple questions to determine the completeness of their team prior to raising:
1. Is someone on the team a deep subject matter expert with the market or product you’re building?
2. Has someone on the team built a successful product from zero?
3. Do you have the right mix of skills across the team required to ship a quality product quickly?
If the answer to any of the questions above is no, what steps need to be taken to fill in any gaps to achieve MFT?
We believe that hiring is one of the best ways to do this quickly.
One of the advantages of joining PearX is that helping founders achieve MFT is a core part of our offering. Over the last 12 months, I have worked with 30 different teams and helped fill over 25 roles. Each of these hires have played a critical role in helping those teams reach MFT and close a successful round of funding.
If you take away one learning from this article, it’s that hiring plays one of the most critical roles in early stage fundraising. Founders who achieve MFT prior to fundraising will have a higher likelihood of success compared to those who don’t.
Pear’s Partner, Pepe Agell, learned the importance of mastering sales during his entrepreneurial journey with Chartboost, a mobile advertising company. Pepe led Chartboost and built sales and go-to-market strategy for the company from its earliest days to its acquisition by Zynga in 2021. He is now a Partner at Pear VC, based in Barcelona and focused on Pear Europe.
This is the third part of our three-part series on building an effective sales strategy, focused on three essential stages of the sales process founders need to master. Before diving into part two, don’t miss part one and part two!
Now that you’ve learned how to run your client meetings effectively, let’s talk about how to construct the perfect sales pitch.
One of the most common mistakes I see is that sales people will often launch into the finer details of the product offering without sharing the bigger vision first and the impact that the solution can have in the customer’s life. Here is how I recommend structuring your pitch to most effectively close deals:
1. When pitching to a client, start with the why before focusing on the how or what.
After you gather as much information as possible from your client, you are ready to pitch your product. I like to follow the why, how, what method.
Simon Sinek has a well-known TED talk all about how great leaders talk about their products by leading with the why. I go back to this TED talk all the time, and I’ve found that the same framework can be applied in sales when talking to clients about your product or solution.
Why: You should lead with a strong explanation of why your solution is the best for the customer. This can include who you are, what is happening in the market, the challenges you’re solving for, and why the customer should listen to you.
Example of a strong why statement: “After watching my dad go through diabetes and battle with insurance companies to get the treatment he needed, I was compelled to start a company that made it easier for elderly adults to navigate the health care system. I found that I had to be my dad’s advocate, calling and negotiating on his behalf, and I realized that not every older adult had that same support system.”
How: Next you can explain how you’re solving the problem the customer has, what your approach is, and some of the details about the product.
Example of a strong how statement: “We decided to build a marketplace where patients could easily onboard their medical information and get paired with the most suitable insurance provider in just few minutes.”
What: Finally you can dive into the what, really explaining what benefit your customers will receive with your help (revenue growth, etc.) and the specific features you offer.
Example of a strong what statement: “For every patient request we get on the platform, we process thousands of insurance quotes and select the most appropriate one for each case. We manage the contractual process, payments and medical claims. All in one mobile app.”
2. Get to a demo as quickly as possible.
Product demos help clients picture your solution in their daily workflows. It is also a clear way of visualizing how are you really solving their problems. From my experience, aha moments and even wow moments in a sales pitch happen during the course of the demo, not while going through slides. That’s why, I strongly recommend to get to the demo part as quickly as possible.
3. While explaining your product to the client, integrate your client into the story.
Slides need to connect to each other through an overarching narrative or story. It’s also important to bring your client along on the journey.
I’ve seen many salespeople feature the client’s logo on the opening slide. That’s great, but it’s much more impactful if you bring the client into your entire story. You can feature pictures of their products, their people, and statements they’ve made. Don’t forget to clearly explain what’s it in for that particular customer or for similar companies that are already working with you (see next point). Remember that your clients don’t care about your product features but the impact that you will have in their day to day.
4. Show proof of benefits from other clients.
I’ve found that it helps to share how other clients have found success with your product, but I recommend talking from a client’s perspective.
Instead of saying: “Our product is really strong at automation, and that’s why clients go with us.”
Try something like: “Clients in a similar growth phase experienced exactly the same pain points, but by implementing our automation tools, they were able to become 50% more efficient.”
5. Explain the next steps and how to get there.
Make sure you clearly explain the onboarding process, using screen shots where necessary, so the clients can really grasp what onboarding your product actually looks like. You should clearly explain how long it will take for the client to go live with your product. Also, if you haven’t already discussed pricing, make sure you do that before you wrap up.
6. Engage your audience meaningfully.
During the sales pitch you shouldn’t just ask “Any questions?” Instead, you’ll get more engagement if you ask meaningful questions like “Does this resonate with you?” or “Do you experience something similar?”
To sum it up, all founders have to implement a successful sales strategy in order to truly succeed. These are the best strategies I’ve developed while building and leading sales teams across regions. I hope they help you be more effective in getting new customers and growing revenue. And remember that “when the pressure is on, you don’t rise to the occasion. You fall to the highest level of preparation.”
This is part three in our series on sales!
If you’re interested in hearing more Pear news and seeing more posts like this, please subscribe in the footer below. We won’t spam you, and it’s easy to unsubscribe at anytime.
Pear’s Partner, Pepe Agell, learned the importance of mastering sales during his entrepreneurial journey with Chartboost, a mobile advertising company. Pepe led Chartboost and built sales and go-to-market strategy for the company from its earliest days to its acquisition by Zynga in 2021. He is now a Partner at Pear VC, based in Barcelona and focused on Pear Europe.
This is the second part of our three-part series on building an effective sales strategy, focused on three essential stages of the sales process that founders need to master. Before diving into part two, don’t miss part one!
Once your outbound sales efforts have been successful, it’s time to prepare for the meeting and lead it effectively. That starts with thinking carefully about how to use the short amount of time that you have with a client. My suggestion is to allocate your time according to the Pear Guide for Sales Meetings.
The Pear Guide for Sales Meetings
Now let’s double click into some of these steps. Here are a few of the strategies I find effective:
1. Before you even meet with the client, try to diagnose their needs, priorities, and budget. This will set you up for success in the meeting.
Aim to walk into the meeting with a solid understanding of the client’s needs. This will allow you to better understand the opportunities that exist within the company you’re selling to. Specifically, you should:
Learn the basics of the company: make sure to look at the company’s website, Crunchbase profile, and social media pages like LinkedIn, Youtube, and Twitter to understand the stage of growth and number of employees.
Assess the client’s strengths, problems, and pain points: take their products for a spin so you can understand the benefits and challenges first hand. Try to assess how your product could add value to what they’re already doing. If it’s a larger public company that you’re selling to, you should listen to their earnings call or read their investor relations report to learn about the company first-hand from its leadership.
Determine whether it would be beneficial to add a C-level team member in the meeting: as you grow, you can leverage the meeting opportunity to include a VP or C-level executive from your side. This might push the client to include an executive or ultimate decision maker from their side as well, making it easier to close the deal.
2. Set yourself up for success before a virtual meeting begins.
Test the Zoom or Google Meet settings 5 minutes before the call begins. Make sure to setup your tabs for the meeting and turn off all notifications on your phone. You should send a courtesy email with a reminder of the dial-in information. And finally, make sure to send any relevant documents or materials to attendees ahead of time.
3. Kickoff the meeting with introductions and take some time to connect personally with attendees.
It’s a good idea to hop on a little early and make small talk with attendees as they’re logging on. Having a good rapport with your clients can go a long way in relationship building.
Once everyone logs on, introduce yourself properly and let others on the call introduce themselves. You should quickly verify the end time of the meeting so you can pace the meeting appropriately.
From there, I advise going through the agenda and sharing your top-line goals with the clients. You should also inquire about any goals they might have for the meeting. This is an important step, but I wouldn’t spend more than 2-3 minutes in total on this. Then dive in!
4. Discover and learn by using the SPIN method to uncover what the client’s true needs are.
Now that you’ve learned as much information as possible about the client and their needs ahead of time, you can put your best foot forward in the meeting. I like to follow the SPIN method to lead a client meeting.
The acronym SPIN refers to the four types of questions that guide sales conversations: Situation, Problem, Implication and Need. You want to breeze through the S and P questions, and really focus on the I and N questions to get the most out of your meeting.
S: Situation Questions – these questions help you understand the basic facts around the client. In my experience, the questions that fall into this category add very little value to a meeting, and most of these questions can be answered in your own background research ahead of time. My advice is to spend as little time as possible here. Example of a situation question: “How many people do you have on your team?”
P: Problem Questions – rather than focusing on situation questions for a long time, you want to jump into problem questions as soon as possible. Problem questions probe clients on the challenges they’re facing in their day to day and with their current product solution, if they have one. You should be careful not to offend the client, in case they were the one who previously decided on the tool or service being used. Example of a problem question: “What are you missing most in your current solution? Does your current tool ever fail?”
I: Implication Questions – after assessing the problems the team is having, you can really dig into the implications and consequences of those problems on their business. This helps to demonstrate why they need to make a change. Example of an implication question: “What’s the productivity cost when the solution fails? ”
N: Need Questions – these questions are designed to uncover the core needs of the prospective client, the benefits they are looking for out of their next solution, and to guide the client to see the benefit of your product or service as a better solution. Example of a need question: “Wouldn’t it be simpler if the process were automated?”
5. Summarize the learnings and then dive into a demo to share information about your company.
Quickly read back what you heard from the client. Example of a read back: “To make sure that I captured your needs correctly, you are currently missing an automated solution?”
From there, it’s time to dive into your presentation of your company. Share your screen and give a demo to your clients, if possible. Throughout the demo, you can link back to the client’s needs. Example of this: “To your point that productivity costs are high, we believed in keeping costs low by [XYZ solution].”
It also helps to share use cases and case studies of other companies and how they found success with your product.
6. Leave time for answering the client’s questions and to do a proper close.
Summarize your findings and some key points. I find a three-point summary works great, but I try to never make it longer than three points.
Thank everyone for their time, and follow up on next steps. Try to have concrete next steps, and again, no more than three.
You should verify that all goals were met and that the clients don’t have any outstanding questions about the product. Log off the meeting (and make sure everything is logged off, like screen sharing).
7. Send a quick follow up note.
After a sales pitch, schedule a few minutes on your calendar to send follow up notes. I recommend make it a bit fun and memorable (i.e. add a picture of the meeting, or your team using the customer’s product…). Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good – timeliness matters, and it’s better to send a good follow up email quickly vs. a perfect follow up email a week later.
Make sure you also save some time to debrief with team members on your side to plan next steps.
In conclusion, you want to be prepared walking into a client meeting, and you should be extremely thoughtful on how you spend your time in the meeting itself. In part three of this series, we’ll dive deeper into how to craft the perfect sales pitch.
This is part two of a three part series on sales. Stay tuned for more!
If you’re interested in hearing more Pear news and seeing more posts like this, please subscribe in the footer below. We won’t spam you, and it’s easy to unsubscribe at anytime.
