By stage
Hiring your first sales hire at Seed
At Seed, the first sales hire is a process bet, not a bookings bet. You are hiring someone to find a repeatable motion alongside a founder who is still in every deal, and that is a different job from carrying a number inside a machine that already works. We screen for it that way.
Who this is for
Founder-led sales. No talent function, often no HR at all. You're hiring seller number one or number two, and you are the buyer, the interviewer, and still the best closer in the company.
What usually goes wrong
Founders interview against a profile borrowed from a company that has infrastructure they don't have yet. The resume looks strong because the numbers are real, but those numbers came with inbound pipeline, a marketing team, a sales engineer, and a manager who had run the play before. Hire that person into a Seed-stage company and they spend six months waiting for support that was never coming.
The comp structure fails the same way.
The number they get wrong is quota, not base. A first sales hire at Seed is building the motion they're being measured on, so putting them on the same quota multiple as a Series B rep sets them up to miss. I'd rather see a lower multiple and a real ramp than a big OTE nobody ever pays out. The founders who get this right treat year one as buying a repeatable process, not buying bookings.
How we run a Seed GTM search
The kickoff is a calibration conversation, not an intake form. Our founder built the talent function at a venture-backed startup from zero, which means the conversation starts from what your first hire will actually have to do on a Tuesday, not from a job description template.
From there:
- 1. Written briefThe kickoff is recorded and turned into a written search brief before any outreach goes out. You see it. If we heard the role wrong, you catch it in week one instead of slate three.
- 2. Calibration slate firstThe first candidates we send are there to sharpen the target, and we say so. Your reactions to them change the search.
- 3. Prepped candidatesEveryone who reaches an interview gets a written brief on your company, your interviewers, and your loop. Candidates who understand the business ask better questions and evaluate faster.
- 4. Reasoned submissionsEvery candidate arrives with a written argument for why this profile fits this search. Not an attachment and a hope.
What you get
A shortlist you can act on, candidates who already understand the stage they're walking into, and a written record of what "good" means for this role that survives the search.
What this costs
We run contingent, retained, and embedded engagements, and every search carries a 90 day guarantee. Fees differ by model and are published in full on our pricing page.