Selling for Founders (Who'd Rather Be Building) 2nd Edition
From Founder-Led Sales to Your First GTM Hire: When, Who, and How
About the Session: You've found your messaging, you're closing deals, and you have customers proving your value. Now comes the next challenge: when do you make your first GTM hire, and how do you do it without breaking what's working?
This hands-on session tackles a critical transition point for B2B SaaS founders—moving from doing all the selling yourself to building a GTM team, then managing them. We'll address the biggest founder fears and issues at this stage: hiring too early, losing control of your sales process, while still being accountable to investors and the board for growth numbers.
About Your Host: Jonathan Tice is the founder of Fit To Scale, a fractional CRO and GTM advisory practice that helps early-stage SaaS and AI startups first improve founder-led selling then shift to repeatable revenue growth. He's supported portcos from YCombinator, 8VC, and Peak XV (formerly Sequoia) and, over just the last six months, more than half of his clients have moved from pre-seed or seed to Series A, compared to 12% of other VC-backed startups founded over the last four years (Carta 2025).
A former revenue leader with multiple successful exits in his career, Jonathan now partners with founders to design pricing systems, playbooks, and commercial frameworks that accelerate traction and enable scale. He is an active contributor to Seattle’s founder ecosystem through AI2 / AI House, Foundations, and Creative Destruction Lab, and regularly mentors founders on messaging, pricing, and GTM readiness.
We'll cover:
The readiness checklist: Are you actually ready to hire, or should you wait?
Who to hire first and what to pay them (with real compensation benchmarks)
How to transfer founder expertise and customer insight without losing deals in the process
Maintaining visibility and control while empowering your new hire
Setting up your first hire for success (not failure) in their first 90 days
Your essential GTM tech stack and process documentation
Balancing delegation with accountability—when to stay involved vs. step back
Why it's different: This isn't generic sales hiring advice. We'll use real scenarios from successful B2B SaaS founders balancing scaling their team, maintaining market insights and customer relationships that drive product decisions and investor confidence.
What you'll leave with:
A decision framework and process for your first GTM hire
A hiring and onboarding playbook tailored for founder-led companies
Systems for maintaining deal visibility without micromanaging
Clear metrics to track and report during the transition period