Hello everyone - my name is Andre Smith, creator of Founder-led — you can call me Dre.
I’m solving a problem I stumbled upon while leading GTM / founder-led sales at my last startup.
Have you ever ended a meeting with a prospect and felt like the call could’ve gone better? Maybe you felt like you didn’t ask the right questions or handled an objection properly?
Feeling this way can be tough and may impact the most important elements of your sales success: confidence and skills
What I’ve noticed is — most founders do not have traditional sales training to help them become efficient with customer discovery, objections, and pricing conversations within their founder-led sales motions.
I’ve sold SaaS and PaaS for the last 12 years and the key to get better in sales is having enough at bats to practice these conversations.
Each conversation uncovers insights on where you need to improve and how to respond in order to gain trust with prospects.
In founder-led sales, teams end up practicing on real opportunities. I believe this is the determining factor on why > 90% of startups fail selling B2B products.
Some of the smartest people in the world are tackling the biggest problems, yet they’re leaving their founder-led sales efforts to chance — hoping some advice they heard at a sales enablement session would help.
If you’re paying attention to how AI is changing sales enablement, you’ve probably came across platforms like Nooks.ai, where later-stage sales teams can practice realistic sales conversations with an agent.
Founder-led is like Nooks’ AI sales coaching product but tailored specifically for founder-led sales.
I’m looking to help founders solve a couple of problems:
1. Founders without sales experience are risking their early opportunities, going into calls without the skills they need to convert prospects into a loyal customers.
2. There isn’t a sales feedback-loop for founders which helps them improve and refine early sales conversations. Later stage teams have sales leadership or proper tooling to help AEs here.
In my MVP, I’m hyper-focused on helping founders master customer discovery with an AI agent that will simulate a conversation as their ICP.
If you’re a founder in the sales trenches right now, I’d love to get your feedback on what I’ve built and see if I can help you consistently land new customers.
Get on our waiting list and I’ll send you a code for immediate access.
Good point. I'm not among the camp who thinks technical people will be completely replaced by AI. I am part of the camp that believes AI will master hard skills long before it can master soft skills.
The thing is, the technical isn't just about converting ideas into implementation; there's a lot of strategy and creativity involved, so the problem space is about equal with "soft skills".
You can automate the repetitive busywork, but not the actual inspiration and direction - not without AGI. And once you have AGI, there's no need for humans at all anymore.
My point exactly. When everyone has the ability to create similar software, the real challenge—and differentiator—becomes distribution. It’s not just about building the product anymore; it’s about knowing how to effectively sell and market it. I'm willing to bet, this single person company will come from someone who deeply understands GTM.
Your premise is flawed because if AI is good enough to replace technical people, then it is also good enough to replace non-technical MBA types. So non-technicals don't have any skill monopoly.
You are also implying that technical is easier than non-technical, which I don't think is true.
Previously the cliche has been that a technical person can learn the non-technical skills, but that vice versa is not so true.
I understand where you are coming from. However, my thought is, the non-technical person would not have to learn every single detail that a technical person has become proficient in to ship a valuable product. Only time will tell. It's still early, but it's already happening.
That slogan is an oversimplification but if I eat a bowl of steel cut at 7am I won't snack or be hungry until 2pm or later. Whether or not I eat this will have a strong impact on my day. Sounds important IMO
Depends on the person. If I eat breakfast I feel like crap for 2-3 hours afterwards. I have friends who can't function for the day before eating first.
It's certainly not the most important meal of the day in general. Especially as a societal meme that came directly from an advertising campaign for a cereal manufacturer.
Hey HN - Dre Smith here, one of the founders here at Nuon.co - helping SaaS and oss companies deploy and run their products in customer cloud accounts (aka Bring your own cloud -BYOC)!
Essentially Infra-in-a-box for BYOC.
We just publicly launched a couple weeks ago and we get a ton of questions about how we solved one of the hardest problems in B2B SaaS. As customers begin to strengthen their security posture with strict data residency requirements - it's becoming more of a thing to run your app in the customer's cloud account.
That said, solving this problem would've been nearly impossible without a robust architecture to power BYOC for everyone.
Today, we're teaming up with Temporal to discuss how we rebuilt our API in 2 weeks using long-lived workflows. We're bullish on Temporal and would love for you to join us for our debut webinar at 9:30a PT.
I’m solving a problem I stumbled upon while leading GTM / founder-led sales at my last startup.
Have you ever ended a meeting with a prospect and felt like the call could’ve gone better? Maybe you felt like you didn’t ask the right questions or handled an objection properly?
Feeling this way can be tough and may impact the most important elements of your sales success: confidence and skills
What I’ve noticed is — most founders do not have traditional sales training to help them become efficient with customer discovery, objections, and pricing conversations within their founder-led sales motions.
I’ve sold SaaS and PaaS for the last 12 years and the key to get better in sales is having enough at bats to practice these conversations.
Each conversation uncovers insights on where you need to improve and how to respond in order to gain trust with prospects.
In founder-led sales, teams end up practicing on real opportunities. I believe this is the determining factor on why > 90% of startups fail selling B2B products.
Some of the smartest people in the world are tackling the biggest problems, yet they’re leaving their founder-led sales efforts to chance — hoping some advice they heard at a sales enablement session would help.
If you’re paying attention to how AI is changing sales enablement, you’ve probably came across platforms like Nooks.ai, where later-stage sales teams can practice realistic sales conversations with an agent.
Founder-led is like Nooks’ AI sales coaching product but tailored specifically for founder-led sales.
I’m looking to help founders solve a couple of problems:
1. Founders without sales experience are risking their early opportunities, going into calls without the skills they need to convert prospects into a loyal customers.
2. There isn’t a sales feedback-loop for founders which helps them improve and refine early sales conversations. Later stage teams have sales leadership or proper tooling to help AEs here.
In my MVP, I’m hyper-focused on helping founders master customer discovery with an AI agent that will simulate a conversation as their ICP.
If you’re a founder in the sales trenches right now, I’d love to get your feedback on what I’ve built and see if I can help you consistently land new customers.
Get on our waiting list and I’ll send you a code for immediate access.
Thank you!! Dre
If you’re interested in reading my manifesto, check it out here: https://www.founder-led.app/manifesto