Mark helps Amplify founders close their first customers. With more than 15 years of experience across sales and SA roles at technical companies like AWS, SingleStore, and Interana, he’s who you turn to when you need help finding your design partners, structuring a POC, getting a deal over the line, and telling your sales story. Mark has directly helped close billions of dollars worth of deal value over the course of his career, from Fortune 50 customers at early stage startups to one of AWS’s largest ever accounts.

How do you work with Amplify companies?

Amplify companies come in all shapes and sizes, but most of the work I do is early stage: seed or Series A. There’s usually no GTM team or strategy in place, and our founders are typically technical and haven’t had much experience doing sales at all. My job is to help those founders figure out founder-led sales, and then when they’re ready, help them get their first few dedicated sales hires. I get involved in anything from finding your first few customers to POC agreements and telling your story. And like the rest of my team, the work I do is a lot deeper than advisory: I am in the meetings, redlining the agreements, and making the presentations with you (ask me about why slideshows are underrated in sales). 

What’s the biggest mistake technical founders make in their early POCs?

There are so many (which I’ve written about here), but the biggest one is probably thinking that you’re not ready. You’re never going to be ready! Building an early stage tech startup is like putting wheels on the car once you’re already rolling. Early adopters have patience for bugs and missing features; as soon as you’re ready to add value at some level, you should be thinking about early POCs. And once we get to that point, you need to have discipline around a test plan: how long are they evaluating, what are we testing, and what does success look like? Structure, and aligned expectations, are what make a good POC – even if behind the scenes, you’re building things as you go.

What’s your issue with PLG?

From an engineer’s perspective, product led growth is great: you don’t need to talk to sales, just put in a credit card and pay for the features you need. From a founder’s perspective though, you get near zero signal from this kind of business model in the early stages. You just do not know if your product is any good, or if your story resonates! And it’s really hard to back that data out from a sea of semi-anonymous users. Your priority should be to get as much high quality 1<>1 feedback as possible, from people who categorically match who you think your ICP is. You don’t need users, you need partners. Design partners, to be more specific.

Once you know that your product is good and your story resonates, then open things up to signups. Product led growth is great: just not too early.