Sales
30 tweets
"Distribution" is becoming a cope term. It's a very loosely-defined word, and it has this air of unattainability about it. It's too easy to say you're limited by your lack of distribution, and curse those who "have it". Here's a reality check: - You can have 100k followers on X and still nobody gives a shit about your product. Your audience and your customers are not necessarily the same thing. - You can have a mailing list of 10,000 people and still get zero conversions due to timing, messaging, or lack of relevance. - You can have millions of people using your free product but nobody wants to pay for the upgrade. Just look at the number of celebrity business ventures that fail. Restaurants, clothing brands, etc. They all have "distribution" but in the end it didn't make a material difference. Success is down to a matrix of different factors. It's about building a product that solves a problem, marketing that communicates that well, pricing that people find fair but also allows you to grow the business, growing multiple different marketing / distribution channels by being valuable and / or interesting, and the skills to do all of the above multiple times over because you won't be successful the first time. If you are looking at successful people on X and scoffing that they are only there because of their "distribution" you're missing the forest for the trees.
Knowing how to send great cold emails is a superpower. My learnings over the years: • 2-3 sentences max, reads like a text • have a clear ask • feels personalized • punchy subject line • avoid vague requests like "pick your brain" • keep it casual • no signature
Instead of just throwing AI at its sales team and expecting results, @NotionHQ did something different: they turned an engineer into a full-blown BDR for a month. This immersion led to a much clearer understanding of the right problem to solve with AI. “From the outside, it seems obvious we should make the sales team move faster by doing account research for them. But when Theo came in and did research, where he ended up was actually account prioritization,” says @PraveshMistry, Notion’s Head Global of Sales. The result was an internal tool that gives reps product signals they use to better prioritize which accounts to reach out to, while also providing them with customized messaging to edit and use in that outreach. If you’re developing internal AI tools, this process is a clear example of how to find the real problem before writing a single line of code. Read the story here: https://firstround.com/ai/notion
I’m running these 3 businesses: - LinkTree for entrepreneurs - Google Analytics for businesses - A marketplace for startups I’ve seen thousands of businesses. One thing I realized is there are millions ways to make money online. You don’t need a trendy idea You don’t need AI in your biz name You don’t need a fancy landing page Solve a problem at least 1,000 ppl have. Don’t quit until you’ve tried everything to reach them all. Repeat for 10 problems. That’s it.
My biggest learnings from Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (ex-Chief Business Officer at @Stripe, now @Vercel COO): 1. What failed seven years ago now works with AI. In 2017, Jeanne tried to build a system at Stripe that would automatically personalize outbound emails based on company data. Despite working with world-class data scientists, it failed due to too many errors. Today, that exact same approach works. This shows how AI has made previously impossible ideas suddenly viable. 2. A single GTM engineer at Vercel reduced a 10-person sales team to 1 (in just 6 weeks). Jeanne’s team at Vercel had an engineer build an AI agent that handles inbound lead qualification, outbound prospecting, and deal loss evaluation. The agent costs $1,000 per year to run versus over $1 million in salaries for the sales team. The nine displaced team members moved to higher-value work rather than being laid off, and the remaining salesperson is 10 times more efficient. 3. Their AI deal-loss bot has become better at understanding what went wrong than humans. When Jeanne analyzed her biggest loss of the quarter, the salesperson blamed pricing. But an AI agent reviewed every email, call transcript, and Slack message and discovered the real reason: they never spoke to the person who controls the budget, and when ROI came up, the customer clearly didn’t believe the value claims. They are now using AI to analyze sales calls in real time and send alerts like “You’re halfway through the sales process and haven’t talked to a budget decision-maker yet.” 4. Wait until $1 million in revenue before hiring your first salesperson. Founders should continue selling themselves until they reach around $1 million in annual revenue with a repeatable process. The key is having a defined ideal customer profile—customers who look alike. 5. Segment customers on what drives their buying decisions, not just company size. OpenAI has roughly 3,000 employees, which would typically put them in the “mid-market” category. But they’re a top-25 website globally by traffic, so Vercel treats them as enterprise customers requiring complex sales. Effective segmentation combines company size with growth rate, web traffic, workload type, and industry—because selling to e-commerce companies requires completely different language than selling to crypto companies. 6. Most customers buy to avoid risk, not to gain opportunity. About 80% of customers purchase to reduce pain or avoid problems, while only 20% buy to increase upside. This means you should focus your sales messaging on what could go wrong without your product—like falling behind competitors or damaging their reputation—rather than just talking about exciting features. This is especially true when selling to larger companies, where individual careers are on the line. 7. Sales teams should be indistinguishable from product managers—for a bit. Jeanne hires salespeople who have such deep product knowledge that if you put one in front of a group of engineers, it should take 10 minutes to realize they’re not a product manager. This credibility allows sales teams to serve as an extension of research and development—a 20-person sales team talks to hundreds of customers weekly and can translate those conversations into product insights at scale. 8. Building your own AI sales tools may beat buying off-the-shelf software. Because AI is so new and every company’s sales process is unique, Jeanne finds that building custom internal agents often delivers more value than buying vendor solutions. A single go-to-market engineer built their deal analysis bot in just two days, perfectly tailored to their specific workflow. These engineers shadow top salespeople to understand their workflows, then build automation that would have taken months or been impossible just a few years ago. 9. Make every sales interaction great, whether customers buy or not. Jeanne replaced boring discovery calls at Stripe with collaborative whiteboarding sessions where customers drew their payment architecture. Many customers had never visualized their own systems before. They left with a useful asset and a feeling of collaboration, regardless of whether they bought. Many returned years later to purchase. Think about your go-to-market process like a product, not just a sales function. 10. Product-led growth has a ceiling—no $100 billion company runs on it alone. While product-led growth (where users can sign up and start using a product without talking to sales) works well for early growth, customers generally won’t spend a million dollars through a self-service flow. Every major technology company eventually builds a sales team for larger deals. The mistake is waiting too long, since building a predictable sales process takes time.
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Marc Andreessen: “The best entrepreneurs of the future will be quite skilled at 6-8 things” Marc is asked how being a founder changes in the age of AI, to which he responds: “I think there are two ways to have a differentiated edge in general — go deep or go broad.” Going deep means becoming a specialized expert in your domain. “There are domains where that really matters,” Marc explains. “In biotech and working on AI foundation models, the deeper you are the better.” But as AI gets more powerful, Marc would bet that “going broad” will be the winning strategy for most fields. He recommends knowing a lot about many different fields and how the world works — then use AI tools to go deep whenever you need to. “If you talk to any of the great CEOs, you see this.” Mark explains. “The really great CEOs are great at product, sales, and marketing people, they’re great legal thinkers, and they’re great at finance and with investors and the press. It’s a multidisciplinary kind of approach.” He continues: “The best entrepreneurs of the future will probably be quite skilled at 6 or 8 things and then will be able to cross-pollinate and combine them.” Video source: @tbpn (2025)
2025 was a massive year at @acquiredotcom! We closed multiple life changing 7-figure deals and even an 8-figure deal. $100+ million in total deal volume. More importantly we learned exactly why those founders won. I’m hosting a webinar breaking down what actually worked in 2025 and how we’re helping founders do the same in 2026. In this webinar, I’ll walk through: > What won in 2025 > What buyers actually underwrite > How founders can set themselves up to win in 2026 If you’re thinking about selling someday (or soon), you should come. Join the webinar: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sr6x4HCiS9yxvuY-oGv_wQ?#/registration…
TBPN has nearly sold out its 2026 ad inventory
TBPN has nearly sold out its 2026 ad inventory
Easiest SaaS landing page headlines that convert: 1. Promise speed (Launch your store in 24 hours, not 24 days) 2. Promise money (Turn $1 in ads into $4 in revenue) 3.Promise certainty (Know exactly which leads will close) 4.Promise simplicity (No code. No setup. Just results.) 5. Promise growth (Go from 100 to 10,000 customers without hiring) 6. Promise peace (Stay compliant in 50 states automatically) Same outcome. Different emotional trigger.
Startup revenue by founder’s 𝕏 follower count: - 0 - 1K followers: $864 - 1K - 10K followers: $5,268 - 10K - 100K followers: $100,373 - 100K - 1M followers: $750,337
Building a startup is really hard. Finding product market is hard. Figuring our sales is hard. Standing out from competition is hard. Staying in the game is hard. All of it is hard but also rewarding. So I hope you go for it regardless.
who wins? 1. a founder who codes fast 2. a founder who sells fast
I've scaled 4 products past $100k MRR everyone asks for the strategy here's what actually worked: 1. week 1: build something, anything, ship it 2. find 5-10 people, get them to try it 3. become annoying - DM, email, call 4. watch them use it (most won't) 5. ask why, fix it, ship again 6. daily check-ins, daily updates 7. solve their actual problem, not what you think it is 8. keep shipping until they beg you not to change anything 9. that's your signal - now go loud 10. content everywhere, SEO grind, paid ads 11. double down on channels that work 12. cut everything else the gap between $0 and $100k? steps 3-8 most people never leave their code editor you can't build a business without talking to humans
if you're a founder read this most companies can get to $1M ARR with only two channels the channels you should pick from are - paid ads - cold email - cold DMs - yt influencer marketing + affiliate the channels you should not pick from are - SEO - email newsletter - organic social - video podcast why you need revenue tomorrow, list one makes that happen list two makes revenue happen in the future, they are long term investments that pay off 12 months from now this is the most common mistake i see founders make the framework to think about this with is how you think about personal finance when you're young, 80% of resources go to surviving and 20% to investment when you're old, 80% goes to investment and 20% to surviving apply this same idea to your young company gl hf
We're launching Lightfield today. It's a CRM designed for founders going zero to one—shaped in the past year by hundreds of founders who took a bet on us and now use it daily, and a waitlist of 20,000 more. When starting out, it takes countless hours of talking to customers to figure out what works. From day zero, Lightfield builds and updates itself from your unstructured conversations with customers. It becomes your customer memory: helping you execute deals, communicate without missing details, and understand patterns across your business. It's free to try. Would love to hear what you think: http:// lightfield.app
The average salary for an entry-level SEO specialist in the US is $67,388. That means many businesses are willing to pay $5,615 per month for someone who might have just learned what WordPress was yesterday. Yet I still see some very skilled people on the SEO services side charging < $1,000 per month. Once you consider campaign expenses, you might make more money working at McDonald's. If you're an agency owner, freelancer, or consultant, please do me a massive favor: 1. Stop undervaluing what you do 2. If you're doing good work and getting your clients results, please increase your prices by at least 3.30% every quarter (to match inflation). 3. Don't let businesses bully you into charging less because they're still living in 2011 (when any could rank #1 in Google). SEO is more complex than ever, and your prices should reflect that.
re: product vs distribution argument “If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.” - @peterthiel in addition, if @naval @elonmusk are also on the same page, wtf are people still arguing for?
