Leah’s ProducTea: Overcoming the fear of founder-led selling | Tadas Labudis

☑ Forget the Sales Stereotype
▪️ If “salesperson” makes you picture a pushy talker, you’re not alone—but great sales is about listening.
▪️ Your authenticity as a founder is your biggest asset. People want to buy from someone real, who’s invested in their product’s success.
▪️ Adapting sales to fit your style helps you thrive in this essential role.

☑ Validate Your Product the Smart Way
▪️ Think your product’s ready to take the market by storm? Early feedback is critical, but treat it as information, not gospel.
▪️ Listen carefully for where you need to adjust your product vs. your messaging. Misaligned expectations could be your positioning issue, not your product.
▪️ Resist changing your product at every “no.” Instead, find patterns in feedback that can help you build a stronger vision.

☑ Build for Retention, Not Just Revenue
▪️ Early on, consider how easy your product is to keep using. What will make users stick around without you there to sell it to them?
▪️ Sometimes, offering a free trial or a free proof-of-concept allows you to validate that users find value in the product—before committing a big budget.
▪️ Retention insights from founder-led sales conversations will steer product development toward something clients can’t live without.

☑ Understand Your Roadmap as an Investment in Efficiency
▪️ Aim to make aspects of your product self-service over time, so you’re reducing the need for sales support with each version.
▪️ Look for ways that product-led tactics (e.g., automating onboarding, simplifying UX) can reduce acquisition and retention costs, even for Enterprise buyers.
▪️ Hybrid sales models that balance product-led and sales-led approaches can help build sustainable revenue—without burning resources on either extreme.

Finding your own style and seeing the results closing the actual deals... that gave me the proof points that I can do this job and enjoy it

I think there's almost no question it's the sales approach because that's the quickest path to revenue

If you have a dream and you just really want to do it, then it's going to cost you money

The embarrassment, being embarrassed in general—that's for most people more scary than dying or getting injured

You can't just hire a salesperson without building that playbook yourself

Once we made the shift to sales-led... we started becoming more successful closing deals

So much about entrepreneurship and product building in UX is about psychology and kind of social science

If you have a great client and that's not your ICP and you have a product gap... think about scalability of the product

We are condensing the most beautiful stuff about us, putting it out there, and hoping that this is how people are forming their opinions

The more you kind of look at that theory, the more things fall into place... why you act a certain way as a Founder

So much about product-led growth... it's just good product management

You could email someone on LinkedIn cold, get a meeting, and then get that first check if you're lucky within a couple of months

If you do outbound and you put your name on it and you are the founder, you have a higher closing chance

So many companies go through this shift, even Slack and some of the other PLG poster children

I cannot stress how true this is... the number one thing that you cannot do with a product is embarrass your customer

I used to love to invite even my engineers to sales calls to just listen in... that story kind of embeds in a different way

If you cannot prove that you can retain people for free, your ICPs, then you should not even think about monetization

So much about founder-led sales is listening. If you're talking too much, you're probably a bad salesperson

Product-led growth is not just about closing as many deals or as quickly as possible... it's more about refining the ICP

When building our product... one of the key distinctions between Prodsight and competitors was completely self-service functionality

The more things kind of fall into place... why people act a certain way in your product or why you act a certain way as a Founder

If your product is really good, you're going to come and have a conversation the year afterward... and start to recommend you

Being someone who is going to be making product decisions... hearing it from the horse's mouth, and then always synthesizing

The immediate solution many new Founders go to is, 'Let's do that to get the sale,' and I think that's how we build a Frankenstein product

Your goal should never be to sell to the client in the end; your goal should always be to leave a good impression

If we invest in product-led growth, this is when we're going to start reaping the reward of cost efficiency

The trap comes in the form of, there's a big potential client, it would be great to have the logo or the revenue

This misconception of 'Oh, they're just out for your money'... that's a category stereotype

If you Outsource this, there is a danger that you just say, 'Oh, my salesperson is not good enough.'

I think my current definition of product-led growth is... they will have different touchpoints with you regardless