Go To Market for Early Stage Startups: Josh Norris on Building First Sales Motions and the Future of Selling

Most founders want to move fast. They want customers. They want revenue. They want to see a pipeline that actually moves. But almost every early stage team eventually hits the same wall. The product is strong. The interest is there. Yet a repeatable go to market motion simply does not exist.

So they hire wrong. Or too early. Or follow advice that does not apply to their model. Or try to scale before the engine is built. And the result is always the same. Chaos. Burnt cash. Lost time. Confusion for the team.

In episode EP6 of Startup Sales Talks, Josh Norris breaks down how early stage founders should think about go to market, how to test assumptions, when to hire, and why the next decade of sales will belong only to those who know how to combine business acumen, story driven selling and AI enabled execution.

Josh is a strategic advisor, operator and fractional go to market lead for pre seed and seed startups. He helps founders build their first repeatable revenue motion, win their early users and scale their first real sales system. His point of view is grounded in deep experience, a product background and a personal story that shaped how he thinks about resilience, learning and long term ownership.

This is the most complete conversation on go to market fundamentals we have had on the pod so far.

The personal philosophy behind how Josh advises founders

Josh did not start his career in sales. He came from product, went through a near fatal car accident, spent a year recovering, rebuilt his life, then years later lost his health again due to severe long covid that doctors could not explain or treat. He had to solve it himself through research, experimentation and stubborn belief that he would get better.

That experience shaped his approach. In his words you cannot succeed in sales or in startups without self belief that comes from inside. Not validation. Not encouragement. Something deeper. And you need a willingness to help others first because a career is built on people who lift each other up.

That mindset shows up in how he guides founders. No shortcuts. No magic frameworks. No copy paste advice. Every company is different. Every go to market problem is contextual. And the first job is to strip away misconceptions and help founders see their market clearly.

What go to market really means for early stage startups

Many founders think go to market is a set of playbooks or a list of channels. Josh defines it differently. Go to market is the system that takes your product from an idea to a revenue engine through real users. And it needs to answer a few simple but hard questions.

Who is the buyer. What problem burns strongly enough that they must solve it. What do they hear in the first ten seconds that makes them care. How do they buy. What moments of trust matter. Where do they spend time. How do they want to evaluate new solutions. What happens after they pay you.

Every answer starts with direct conversations with real users. Not pitch decks. Not assumptions. Not downloaded templates from LinkedIn. The real thing.

You build a story. You test it. You launch early access. You get rejected. You adapt messaging. You refine the narrative. You learn what breaks. You see which users cannot imagine living without your product. Then you repeat it until signals become patterns.

There is no other way to build a go to market motion that does not collapse later.

The biggest mistake founders make

According to Josh the most common mistake is taking advice from the wrong people. Social media is full of loud opinions about outbound, inbound, SDRs, cold calling, team structure and AI. Most of it is not wrong. It is just not relevant to your specific situation.

A founder selling a ten dollar per month tool to small teams should not copy the playbooks of a company selling million dollar enterprise contracts. And a startup selling to enterprise CFOs should not copy the outbound sequences of a startup selling to marketers.

The context matters. Stage matters. Market category matters. Contract value matters. Buying committee size matters. Maturity of the product matters.

Good founders do not use generic tactics. They work with advisers who have built motions for their exact buyer. They study companies a little ahead of them. They listen to users, not noise.

How to build a repeatable process in a world that keeps changing

Josh breaks it into three parts.

Start with the problem. Build personas around who feels the problem most. Map where they spend time online. Then design a narrative that confronts their beliefs in the first ten seconds. Buyers do not listen long enough for complicated pitches. They decide in seconds whether you are worth their attention.

Once the narrative lands you launch experiments. Early access groups. Outreach tests. Content loops. Website messaging tests. And one by one you find what consistently brings the right people into conversations.

Repeatability comes from patterns. Not theory.

The right moment to hire your first salespeople

Founders often want to delegate sales too early. The truth is simple. If you do not have true product market fit no salesperson can save you. Product market fit is not a dashboard metric. It is emotional. If you removed your product today would people be angry. If yes you have something. If no your foundation is not ready.

Once the product matters deeply to users and the founder has closed enough deals to understand the motion, then it becomes time to bring in help. Not before.

Josh describes common mistakes. Hiring big tech sellers who expect structure. Hiring too junior SDRs who are unprepared for complex conversations. Or hiring before engineering is ready which leads to bugs, broken trust and a backlog that blocks all progress.

The right hire in early stage sales is someone comfortable with chaos, experimentation and ambiguity. Someone who can build while selling.

What a successful early sales build looks like

Josh shares examples from companies that did it right.

One example. A startup with strong product love. The founders were closing mid size deals. They wanted to move up market. Before scaling they hired a VP of sales who had already built a team selling to similar buyers. He brought in people he trusted. They used both product signals and qualitative user feedback. They validated demand before touching scale. Only then did they bring in more reps. The engine worked because timing was right.

Another example. A startup selling to physical location teams like casinos and stadiums. They hired one salesperson to multiply the co founder’s time. They used a commission only consultant to fill top of funnel. Josh came in to analyze past data, eliminate wasted motions, and focus the team on what actually produced results. In a few months they were closing consistently and preparing for a fundraise they might not even need.

Focus. Timing. Narrow experiments. Clear motion. That is what early stage success looks like.

The cost of doing it wrong

Josh also shares the opposite scenario. A startup that waited far too long to hire engineering. Users forgave bugs at first but when larger accounts arrived everything broke. The team spent months fighting technical debt instead of shipping new features. Sales slowed. Deals slipped. Trust eroded. Roadmap froze. The company still has not recovered.

Bad timing rarely kills a startup instantly. It bleeds them slowly.

How the next decade of sales will evolve

Josh has one of the clearest views on the future of selling we have heard on the show.

Over the next few years sales will split into two groups. Highly skilled professionals with business acumen, technical fluency and mastery of AI tools. And everyone else.

The professionals who understand their buyer, think like consultants, create content, build trust and use AI to multiply their work will dominate. Reps who rely only on activity volume, templates and outdated tactics will find themselves unemployable.

AI will become indistinguishable from humans in many parts of the sales process.

Prospecting, cold emailing, cold calling, qualification, guidance, discovery prep. This will not eliminate sales. It will amplify the ones who know how to use it.

In ten years it will feel as strange to talk to a salesperson for basic information as it feels today to call an airline to change a flight. Buyers will expect automated systems for common tasks and will only engage humans for strategic or high value conversations.

Content will become the last irreplaceable human signal. People will crave authentic voices. Micro communities. Real stories. Personal insights. If you do not build a public presence now you are already late.

What founders should do to prepare

Josh’s advice is direct. Build your strategic narrative. Learn how to tell your story in a way that reframes your buyer’s world. Understand your customers deeply. Learn business fundamentals. Build content. Adopt AI early. Surround yourself with advisers who have done exactly what you are trying to do. And never outsource the hard work of understanding your market.

The founders who master these skills will navigate the next decade with momentum. Those who wait will be overwhelmed by the speed of change.

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