Sales Lead
The first sales hire, selling a marketplace to the two sides of it — the teams that install and the publishers who list.
Nobody has sold this yet, which is the job. Two motions, and they are not the same conversation: an engineering team that already uses MCP and needs one account, one bill and an audit trail instead of fifteen API keys on fifteen laptops; and a publisher with a good server and no distribution, who wants to know what the 12% buys and how fast a payout lands. You would run both, write the first version of everything — the deck, the sequences, the objection list — and hand back what the product has to change for the next ten deals to be easier than the first ten.
Two things that are true by then
Not a list of duties. These are the outcomes we would judge the hire on, and they are the ones we would expect you to hold us to if they turn out to be impossible for reasons nobody mentioned in an interview.
What you would actually work on
Teams that already use MCP
They have the servers and none of the governance: keys on laptops, no log, no cap, nobody who can say what a tool can reach. The pitch is the seat plan and the audit trail, and the demo is their own mess with a ceiling on it.
Publishers with something worth listing
A working server and no buyers. The conversation is distribution, the split, and how long money takes to arrive — and the honest answer to the third one is the reason this is a sales job rather than a marketing one.
The first pipeline this company has
Sourcing, the sequences, the CRM hygiene, the forecast. You would be building the thing you are also running, for at least two quarters.
Telling us what is in the way
The objection you hear four times is a product change, not a slide. You would be the person who makes that argument with the transcript attached.
What we are looking for, and what we are not
The right-hand column is not a formality. Each line is something a candidate has apologised for in an interview for this role, and none of it has ever decided one.
- You have sold a technical product to engineers, and you can hold a terminal open while you do it. Selling infrastructure to people who can read the docs faster than you can present them is a specific skill.
- You have been early somewhere — first or second commercial hire — and you know the difference between running a process and writing one.
- You can talk about a 12% take rate and a Friday payout without flinching, because both of those come up in the first call with a publisher.
- You write well. Most of this job is written, and a marketplace that writes carefully everywhere else cannot have a sales inbox that does not.
- A closed book of MCP contacts. Nobody has one; this market is eighteen months old.
- Enterprise-only experience. The first fifty deals here are small, fast and technical.
The loop for this role
Four conversations, of them in total, scheduled inside your working hours rather than ours. Two to three weeks end to end if diaries cooperate. What we do not do is on the openings page and applies to every role here.
How to apply
Four fields. No cover letter, no portal account, no form that asks you to retype a CV it has already parsed. If the last field is the only one you fill in properly, that is the one we read first.
This lands in hiring/sales-lead and is read by the founder — not by a screen, not by a keyword filter and not by anyone outside the team you would join. A reply either way inside 5 working days, and a no that says which part it was.