Capital is abundant in this world. Operational freedom, once lost, is very difficult to regain.

Publicly traded shares do give a company financial flexibility. But they remove operational flexibility. There is a pernicious cascade of unintended consequences that gets put in place upon an IPO that lead to a set of virtual shackles being placed on your (and your company’s) ankles and wrists.

Study the marketplace. Segment it into different customer types. Determine which segment is the least satisfied with their current solution and for whom your solution is the best fit. Concentrate all your sales and engineering efforts toward this segment. Land a few of these customers.

rather than go after the entire market at once, the key is to find a small segment of the market (i.e., a set of customers with similar pain points) that has a particularly difficult problem for whom your solution is indeed ten times better than the broad, nonspecific legacy solution. This is your low-hanging fruit.

But history tells a different story. The greatest risk of a startup is not that they moved too slowly in dominating the entire marketplace, but rather that they spread their scarce resources too thin and ended up securing few or no customers at all.

The essential goal of strategic marketing and competitive analysis is choosing your target beachhead. The essential goal of product management is achieving product-market fit. And the essential goal of tactical marketing is growing sales.

Contrary to popular belief, the best closers are most often not the best managers.

Despite their track record at other companies, if your salespeople don’t know about your industry, your product, and your process, they will not be operating at max capacity.

This means that you first want to hire a qualifier and a farmer while you act as the closer, and only once this system is running smoothly do you want to invest in an AE.