Hire Readiness for before your first dollar
The fastest way to fail at pre-revenue is to hire a salesperson before you can repeatedly close deals yourself. You’re not too busy to sell. You’re hiring to escape a skill gap.
Find out where you standWhy this matters now
Founders who can’t close consistently look at the stack of unclosed deals and conclude they need help. They don’t. They need a clearer picture of who buys and why, and the only way to get that is to be in the conversations. A sales hire at this stage can’t fix what the founder hasn’t figured out: there’s no playbook to inherit, no qualified pipeline to work, no objections library to study. The hire spends three months trying to reverse-engineer the founder’s tacit knowledge, fails, and leaves. The founder is back where they started, minus the salary.
Questions you should be able to answer
Have you personally closed at least 10 deals, enough to know what works without thinking?
Could you write down the steps you take from first conversation to signed contract in enough detail that a new hire could follow them?
Do you have a documented objection-handling guide, or does it all live in your head?
Is your reason for hiring “I am too slow” or “I don’t enjoy this”?
The trap to avoid
Hiring out of avoidance
The decision to hire feels strategic but is often emotional. Founders who don’t enjoy selling tell themselves they’ll be “more productive” elsewhere. The honest test is: if you had unlimited hours, would you still hire? If yes, you have a real bandwidth problem. If no, you have an avoidance problem, and a salesperson won’t fix it.
What changes next
At early-revenue, the question changes. With a documented motion and 5 to 10 closed deals, your first hire is amplifying a working system. Pre-revenue, there’s no system to amplify.
The full hire readiness guide