At Long Term Impact, we believe a critical ingredient for success of an early stage edtech startup is that founding team has fully embraced being Salesperson #1 – especially if they are pursuing the “third way” of growth. The longer the founders avoid sales, the further they fall behind in finding product-sales fit. What is product-sales fit?

We’ve encountered a big mistake in how early stage founders are spending their limited time, energy, and resources:

No one on the founding team has fully embraced being “Salesperson #1”

Without anyone on the founding team being Salesperson #1, we believe that the startup will likely fail to reach the three milestones above – specifically, they will reach the end of their runway before finding enough product-sales fit to break even.