David Skok

>The sort of skills that would eventually allow me to run my own company/team/org.

These are different things. Running your own company more often than not implies you have started the company, and the skills you need to start and run a company are different in and of themselves, let alone the fact they're different from running a team in an established company/organization where you never think about how the power is still on.

In smaller companies and startups, the opportunity to learn is yours if you want it and the incentive to do so is survival. The company is small enough that you can, if you're so inclined, be involved in and learn about everything.

I answered a few questions on some topics you might find relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40482961

There are a few replies there about communication and alignment. More (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25288605)

A FAANG is so large that the acronym is just five letters, and procuring whiteboard markers to them could be the biggest contract another company ever had.

What you want is to expand the spectrum of your involvement or "ownership". One way of doing that is to learn to sell into the enterprise.

Imagine you are a startup and you want to sell your product to [insert your company]. How would you go about it? It teaches you many things: What problem does it solve? For whom is it a problem? Why is it a problem? Why now? Are they aware it is a problem?…

I'm seeing a lot of people in this thread balking at the $2B in losses. The thing is that aggregate profit is a terrible metric for measuring companies that have a recurring revenue model with high upfront costs (as WeWork, Uber, and many other tech startups do).

The reason for this is profit doesn't factor in investments. Let's say I invest $1200 to acquire one customer who pays me $100/month. If you look at month 0, I have -$1200 in profit. At first glance, this looks really bad. Alternatively, you can see it as I am now making $100/month. Because of the $100/month, after one year I'll have made my original investment back and still be making $100/month. After two years, I'll have made a profit of $1200.

This is probably exactly what's happening here with WeWork. If you look at things in aggregate, WeWork is spending a ton of money investing in opening new offices while they make a much smaller amount of money from their old offices. This makes them look like they are lighting money on fire. In reality they are investing their money in new offices and expect each office to make a return on investment over a few years. As long as they are spending more money investing in new offices than they are making from the old ones, they will appear unprofitable.

For a typical software business, a pair of metrics that are much better than profit are CAC (cost of acquiring a customer) and LTV (the life time value of a customer). As long as a product's LTV is sufficiently greater…

Sales-savvy-co-founder of a bootstrapped company here. Stop. You don't need a sales person, you shouldn't be cold calling, or even selling over the phone.

Why?

It won't be profitable at your current pricing model ($132/year) unless you are pursuing large universities or university buying groups that can purchase 75+ licenses per year (~$10k ACV).

If your ACV for each sale is over $10k (even $5k but that's getting down there) then it makes sense to have a direct sales team.

If your ACV is under $10k, then you'll need to find more capital efficient ways of reaching customers. Not my area of expertise, David Skok has a great post about sales complexity that'll do a much better job than I can [0].

If you're ACV is above $10k I'd be happy to offer some tips on building a sales team behind that (I don't charge for consulting). We have a product that you're a little too early for but may be able to help when you're further down the road.

My details are in my profile, feel free to reach out if you'd like some advice.

[0] http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/sales-complexity/

Edit: Moving link to bottom.

Hi, dev here too working on my own side project, also an introvert, and English isn't my first language.

You got a point, sales is a transferrable skill after all.

But I think your sticking point is getting caught up in perfecting your pitch instead of actually getting infront of your target customers, trying to onboard them, letting it play out, and calibrating your product and onboarding process rightafter.

My gut tells me it's a bit of anxiety in a way that it's blurry on how you should onboard your first few customers (which is a nerve-racking thing tbh as it varies on whatever type of biz you're looking into).

Do you really need to take a 50% pay cut to figure it out? Maybe some reading could help, as a lot of founders have probably experienced this already..

- https://stripe.com/atlas/guides

- https://www.ycombinator.com/library

- https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/

- https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/

"Once you get a lead, if it takes even a single phone call to close them, you’re no longer doing self-service and Customer Acquisition Costs vs. Self-Service pricing is going to kill you. If you’re not doing that phone call and you’re also not closing those deals, you need to figure out of if you can solve the problem through conversion optimization or if you really do need to be speaking with customers in order to close them. "

Wow, can you bold this?
Touchless sale/conversion = win.

David Skok talks about it brilliantly and has an eagle eye on these metrics when evaluating his SaaS investments - http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/business-models/the-touchless-conversion/

No one really talks about backing into pricing based on LTV/CAC ratio (affected by for example measurable inbound marketing or cpc/cpm costs).

Pay back period (ideally CAC < a year) is also a factor.
http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/

The main thing to consider is, as your customer acquistion scales, does your headcount/labor cost scale as well? If so, that should be a factor in your CAC calculation.

I don't think there's one canonical formula. But here are David Skok's thoughts:

"To compute the cost to acquire a customer, CAC, you would take your entire cost of sales and marketing over a given period, including salaries and other headcount related expenses, and divide it by the number of customers that you acquired in that period. (In pure web businesses where the headcount doesn’t need to grow as customer acquisition scales, it is also very useful to look customer acquisition costs without the headcount costs.)"

[0] http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/startup-killer/