Perch's lost year and founder-led sales

2023 was a lost year for Perch. Not because we stopped selling. Because I stopped selling.

I hired a sales director and shifted my focus to fundraising and new markets. Made sense at the time. But in doing so, I stepped away from the front lines. The direct customer signal I had been relying on to make product decisions started to fade, and with it, my conviction.

We grew that year. We didn't hit our targets.

The product decisions got slow. We shipped features, but not the right ones. We'd debate direction for weeks, hedge our bets, and pick off small safe improvements instead of making the real calls.

Perch Plan, our single biggest product enhancement and one that ended up driving a ton of business, came a year too late. It was a huge decision and I didn't have enough conviction to make it when the company needed it.

Here's what I learned: founder-led sales isn't just about closing deals. It's your highest-signal input into product strategy. You're likely saying "Duh, Jacob, that's obvious." But the impact is more subtle than you think.

When you're in front of customers, you know what moves them. You know which objections keep coming up. You know which features they ask about and which ones they ignore. ⭐ That knowledge builds intuition, and intuition gives you the conviction to make big, uncomfortable product bets with incomplete information. ⭐

If the founder wants to stay involved in product but loses that intuition, you can end up making the wrong product calls, or worse, no calls at all.

Winston Weinberg, CEO of Harvey, said it even more bluntly on the Long Strange Trip Podcast with Brian Halligan: "The times I'm best at product is when I'm selling the most. It's not even close." (definitely give Brian's podcast a listen if you haven't!).

At some point, every founder needs to hand off sales. When exactly is complex. It depends on the business, growth trajectory, what the founder loves to do, the maturity of the product org and so much more. We didn't get it right.

But here's what I know: if you want to be a product leader, you also need to be a sales leader in one way or another.