Founder-led Sales is Broken

Hello everyone - my name is Andre Smith, creator of Founder-led — you can call me Dre.

I’m solving a problem I stumbled upon while leading GTM / founder-led sales at my last startup.

Have you ever ended a meeting with a prospect and felt like the call could’ve gone better? Maybe you felt like you didn’t ask the right questions or handled an objection properly?

Feeling this way can be tough and may impact the most important elements of your sales success: confidence and skills

What I’ve noticed is — most founders do not have traditional sales training to help them become efficient with customer discovery, objections, and pricing conversations within their founder-led sales motions.

I’ve sold SaaS and PaaS for the last 12 years and the key to get better in sales is having enough at bats to practice these conversations.

Each conversation uncovers insights on where you need to improve and how to respond in order to gain trust with prospects.

In founder-led sales, teams end up practicing on real opportunities. I believe this is the determining factor on why > 90% of startups fail selling B2B products.

Some of the smartest people in the world are tackling the biggest problems, yet they’re leaving their founder-led sales efforts to chance — hoping some advice they heard at a sales enablement session would help.

If you’re paying attention to how AI is changing sales enablement, you’ve probably came across platforms like Nooks.ai, where later-stage sales teams can practice realistic sales conversations with an agent.

Founder-led is like Nooks’ AI sales coaching product but tailored specifically for founder-led sales.

I’m looking to help founders solve a couple of problems:

1. Founders without sales experience are risking their early opportunities, going into calls without the skills they need to convert prospects into a loyal customers.

2. There isn’t a sales feedback-loop for founders which helps them improve and refine early sales conversations. Later stage teams have sales leadership or proper tooling to help AEs here.

In my MVP, I’m hyper-focused on helping founders master customer discovery with an AI agent that will simulate a conversation as their ICP.

If you’re a founder in the sales trenches right now, I’d love to get your feedback on what I’ve built and see if I can help you consistently land new customers.

Get on our waiting list and I’ll send you a code for immediate access.

Thank you!! Dre

If you’re interested in reading my manifesto, check it out here: https://www.founder-led.app/manifesto