Exactly. Thought so…struggling a little. The majority of founders and investors we spoke with did too. Some cleary smashed it out of the ball park (forgive the US analogy, or should I say out of the Stadium with a UK cricket bent). But that was the minority. Many of us don’t have natural networks of people that are exceptional sales people. In one exchange with a couple of founders when asked “Who is the best sales person you know?” they joked that it was the founders themselves. There is much truth in that statement. Many founders are natural born salespeople. They have to sell their vision day in and day out. To employees, partners, customers and investors. But a salesforce of one or two, is not scalable.
We are a group of founders, operators and investors that believe that the majority of founders, especially technical ones, are great at being able to build solutions however struggle with i) selling the product ii) finding product market fit. AstraNova was born as a community to help with the former, i.e. address the great sales challenge. The need for founders to find Sales Allies, those that can help breathe revenue into the early stage business helping them accelerate and reach the next rung of their funding journey.
Our solution is focused on helping founders find the best sales, channel sales, business development, partnerships, international expansion, growth, customer success and revenue experts was to create an invitation only online community. One with high signal experts that were available to help startups increase their revenue.
You may ask that in a world full of online destinations such as Linkedin and AngelList, why do we need another? We answer that with one word. Focus. We see Linkedin as an invaluable resource, however its just simply too large a network, who was the last person you connected with that you have never met and have never done any work with. Also AngelList belonged to a set of “broadcast” startups that were not social, were not created with engagement in mind and were limited in their inability to create a dialogue between those wanting to work with another beyond the paradigm of a traditional jobs board.