The first customers give a founder confidence. You can explain the product, answer the difficult questions, and get someone to take a chance on what you are building.
But if every deal still needs you, what have those wins actually proved?
When I sat down with Karthik Krishnan, founder and CEO of Concentric AI, he described how closely he managed the company’s earliest sales. Every presentation. Every proof of concept. Even the pricing and licensing conversations.
That involvement served a purpose beyond closing revenue.
Karthik was learning what made someone buy, what a successful deployment required, and which customer problems the product could reliably solve. With a background in product, he also carried feedback directly into engineering, keeping the context intact.
He describes those early customers as buying more than the product. They were taking a bet on his credibility and his promise that the company would deliver.
That is a powerful way to win the first fifteen or twenty customers. It also leaves a question unanswered.
Can someone else sell it?
Karthik’s point is that a salesperson cannot carry all the context a founder has, however much training they receive. The founder knows why the product exists, what it might become, and how to connect those possibilities to the person across the table.
A growing sales team needs something more repeatable.
He warns against having ten customers with ten different use cases. The founder might be able to explain a different vision to each of them. That gives the team very little they can consistently take to the next hundred customers.
For Karthik, the early sales work has to produce a clearer model: the critical use cases, the outcomes customers care about, and a way for other people to explain them.
What stood out to me is how easily a founder could mistake being needed for making progress.
Stepping into another sales call may help close that opportunity. But if the same intervention is needed every time, I would want to understand what the team is missing. Is the use case clear enough? Are we selling to similar customers? Does the promise change depending on who is in the room?
Those questions matter before hiring more people to repeat a process that only works when the founder runs it.
Karthik still talks to customers. What has changed is what the business needs from those conversations. His role now includes understanding where the market is going, while his leadership team handles work he once managed himself.
The first customers can buy your conviction.
The next hundred need a promise your team can explain and deliver.
Until next time,
Firas Sozan
The PMF Playbook