Hey friends,
Today I want to tell you a story about a founder I worked with - twice.
First a few years back, then again recently.
Back then, it was a marketplace, we were right after Covid, I launched Inscaler few months prior.
We knew each other, and he reached out.
I helped them build their first sales team and set up the process.
It worked. For a while.
Customers came in, deals closed, and we thought we had PMF.
CRM had a strong pipeline, as far as I remember.
Then things changed.
They went for funding and they got rejections.
It was the SaaS surge era, when marketplaces were not really hot, I believe.
They pushed for a long time before finally starting to pivot.
Then, silence. Two years, or more. Nothing on LinkedIn.
When a founder goes quiet, it usually means one of two things:
Either might’ve been right.
On LinkedIn, you see the loud founders, funding rounds, big launches.
Good for them.
But there’s a whole group quietly rebuilding, figuring out their next move.
You don’t hear about them until they’re ready.
This founder was one of them.
When they came back, it was a new company.
Different space, but not far from what they knew.
It took two years of trial and error. Until it worked.
I have seen them back on LinkedIn too, telling their new story to the world.
Raised an early round, onboarded a sales team.
Kicked things off.
So they reach out again to work together.
This time, my role was different.
If last time I had to help them build, this time was way easier.
Lots of demand from the market, and I helped refocus and refine their GTM.
For this reason, I spent a lot of time listening to their sales demos and giving feedback after each call.
If you know me, you know I always push founders to do great discovery calls.
Open, strategic questions about the business before showing the product.
They got it.
In most demos, the prospect did most of the talking.
What the prospects said was the clearest sign of PMF (product market fit) I could ask for.
Each prospect explained their problems in their own words.
Each problem matched a feature the platform already had.
The prospect described the pain. The team showed where it was already solved in the platform.
Beautiful.
It was pure PMF.
After this, I kept thinking about one thing: how do you know when to let go, and when to push through?
This founder did both.
They pushed with the marketplace for years. When everybody around them was celebrating rounds, they started again.
They let it go the old for the new.
They made it (so far), and I don’t think they will have a problem growing from here.
But how did this happen? I don’t have a rule for this.
From what I saw, letting go is the hard part.
Closing something you built with people who believed in you hurts.
But also executing a whole new product and vision is tough.
Being there for both parts, and seeing them get to real PMF after everything, is one of the best things that’s happened to me in this job.
I’m very proud of them, and I’m so lucky to experience this from within.
To the founder - if you recognise yourself, I want to say I’m proud of you.
For those who resonate with the moment, keep going and remember you can step back to step forward.
You will never know until you do it.
Thanks for reading this far, see you all next week!
