[hellcow]

I started my current enterprise SAAS company 4 years ago. It took more than a year before we had our first customer (who left us!), 2.5 long years before we raised $350k on the promise of signing a big company. After 2.5 years "without a job" my whole family was pressuring me into just getting a job a tech company. "It was obviously not going to work if we hadn't succeeded by now."

But I knew we had something special in the tech.

That little bit of cash helped us hire a great head of sales with experience building companies like ours from the ground up. We couldn't afford to pay him even an order of magnitude less than what he would normally charge, but after seeing the product he turned down dozens (!) of offers from VC darling startups to work with us, for free, on the basis that we would pay him when the sales worked. For most of the next year and a half, we had steady linear growth, but it was enough to attract funding.

Now we've built a great team of 20 people and are on track to way exceed our numbers for this quarter. We still have a lot of work ahead of us.

If you know you have something special, then fight for it. It takes a lot longer than you expect.

[radihuq]

Awesome story. Where did you find this head of sales, and how'd you convince them to work at your company? I know you said the tech was special but was that really all that it took to convince them? Was there more at play (eg. Attractive company culture, industry, etc)?

[hellcow]

We met through our pre-seed investor--our first check. It was a combination of track record of founders and tech that seemed too good to be true, but he could see it working.

Same reason a later seed investor put money in. "If it works, why wouldn't any company buy it?" As we learned (and are still learning) great tech and an obvious market need are only tiny pieces of the puzzle to figure out.

None of us had any experience in the industry, and the company was 3 people at the time our head of sales came on board--not much of a culture to speak of.

[radihuq]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing.

Just checked out your site - landing page looks very aesthetically pleasing and I think the product does have a ton of potential. I can see how others thought this was too good to be true 4 years ago.

Goodluck with everything!

[gcheong]

What were the signals that you had something special?

[hellcow]

We were trying to solve a difficult engineering challenge that no one in the industry had been able to replicate.

If we could get it to work, it would reduce costs massively for businesses, so it seemed to me at the time that it wasn't a question of product market fit. Of course the market wants this. The only question was, can we build it? Will it work?

When we saw it working, we knew we were close. Didn't know that close was still 3 years away though!