ExecutiveDre

Most early stage founders put a ton of time into follow-up emails only to get ghosted.

I'm seeing this pattern emerge with the founders I'm working with. So I built them a tool based on 13 years of selling to the enterprise, and now releasing to other founders who need help.

The Pattern: - Great first call. - The prospect is engaged. - Pain is real. - Budget exists. - Both sides leave excited. - Founder spends 20 minutes (or 2 min if you're using Claude) writing a follow-up email.

and... ...crickets. Radio silence. No response. and the founder thinks the deal is dead.

It's not dead. It just doesn't have a plan.

Next steps alone are not a plan.

Here's what's actually happening:

The prospect left the call with questions or comments they never voiced.

Concerns they didn't want to raise in the moment.

Internal stakeholders they still need to convince.

And the founder sent them a monologue with 3 attachments.

A one-sided recap email that required nothing from the prospect. - No response needed. - No alignment required. - No shared ownership of what happens next. So nothing happens next.

The #1 reason early stage founders get ghosted isn't their product.

It's that they have no mechanism for the prospect to stay engaged after the call ends. - No shared plan. - No mutual next steps. - No space for the prospect to say "yes, you heard me right" or "actually, I have a question about this part."

This is what Mutual Action Plans solve.

A MAP isn't a sales tactic. It's a shared document both sides co-own. Outlining what was discussed, what was agreed, and what happens next.

When a prospect co-owns the plan, they don't ghost it.

Ghosting would mean abandoning something they helped build.

Most founders have never heard of a MAP.

The ones who use them close faster and hear "no" sooner, which is equally valuable.

If you're doing early-stage sales, and your follow-up is a recap email, it's worth looking deeper into the alignment you're having with prospects post call.

I built Pipeline for the founders I work with to make this automatic.

Call ends → AI turns your transcript into a collaborative mutual action plan → Invite the prospect into the plan → Both seller and prospect co-author alignment to move the deal forward.

No more guessing. No more manual follow-up emails. No more ghosting.

You can use it for free on your first 3 opptys

I use it within my own cycles, went live this month, closed 2 deals for my business and also helped a founder close their first 5-figure deal.

If you need a walkthrough, I'd be happy to help you close your next deals with it.

Let's get it!

Dre

Hello everyone - my name is Andre Smith, creator of Founder-led — you can call me Dre.

I’m solving a problem I stumbled upon while leading GTM / founder-led sales at my last startup.

Have you ever ended a meeting with a prospect and felt like the call could’ve gone better? Maybe you felt like you didn’t ask the right questions or handled an objection properly?

Feeling this way can be tough and may impact the most important elements of your sales success: confidence and skills

What I’ve noticed is — most founders do not have traditional sales training to help them become efficient with customer discovery, objections, and pricing conversations within their founder-led sales motions.

I’ve sold SaaS and PaaS for the last 12 years and the key to get better in sales is having enough at bats to practice these conversations.

Each conversation uncovers insights on where you need to improve and how to respond in order to gain trust with prospects.

In founder-led sales, teams end up practicing on real opportunities. I believe this is the determining factor on why > 90% of startups fail selling B2B products.

Some of the smartest people in the world are tackling the biggest problems, yet they’re leaving their founder-led sales efforts to chance — hoping some advice they heard at a sales enablement session would help.

If you’re paying attention to how AI is changing sales enablement, you’ve probably came across platforms like Nooks.ai, where later-stage sales teams can practice realistic sales conversations with an agent.

Founder-led is like Nooks’ AI sales coaching product but tailored specifically for founder-led sales.

I’m looking to help founders solve a couple of problems:

1. Founders without sales experience are risking their early opportunities, going into calls without the skills they need to convert prospects into a loyal customers.

2. There isn’t a sales feedback-loop for founders which helps them improve and refine early sales conversations. Later stage teams have sales leadership or proper tooling to help AEs here.

In my MVP, I’m hyper-focused on helping founders master customer discovery with an AI agent that will simulate a conversation as their ICP.

If you’re a founder in the sales trenches right now, I’d love to get your feedback on what I’ve built and see if I can help you consistently land new customers.

Get on our waiting list and I’ll send you a code for immediate access.

Thank you!! Dre

If you’re interested in reading my manifesto, check it out here: https://www.founder-led.app/manifesto

Good point. I'm not among the camp who thinks technical people will be completely replaced by AI. I am part of the camp that believes AI will master hard skills long before it can master soft skills.

I understand where you are coming from. However, my thought is, the non-technical person would not have to learn every single detail that a technical person has become proficient in to ship a valuable product. Only time will tell. It's still early, but it's already happening.

My point exactly. When everyone has the ability to create similar software, the real challenge—and differentiator—becomes distribution. It’s not just about building the product anymore; it’s about knowing how to effectively sell and market it. I'm willing to bet, this single person company will come from someone who deeply understands GTM.

3 meals a day + snacks don't make sense for the body but good for business.

Two years ago, we noticed a trend among SaaS pricing pages.

More teams began to offer a new deployment option for enterprise customers.

Back then, everyone had a different name for this deployment option.

We heard... Private SaaS Cloud-prem Dedicated Managed Self-hosted and BYOC to name a few..

Mid last year, we decided to double down on the BYOC terminology into our marketing and many startups are doing the same.

For GTM and Product teams looking to sell #BYOC as a deployment option...

It's become quite clear that customers are resonating with "Bring Your Own Cloud" as the preferred marketing copy to this offering.

Happy Selling! Dre

Who’s bullish or bearish on Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)?

Hey HN - Dre Smith here, one of the founders here at Nuon.co - helping SaaS and oss companies deploy and run their products in customer cloud accounts (aka Bring your own cloud -BYOC)!

Essentially Infra-in-a-box for BYOC.

We just publicly launched a couple weeks ago and we get a ton of questions about how we solved one of the hardest problems in B2B SaaS. As customers begin to strengthen their security posture with strict data residency requirements - it's becoming more of a thing to run your app in the customer's cloud account.

That said, solving this problem would've been nearly impossible without a robust architecture to power BYOC for everyone.

Today, we're teaming up with Temporal to discuss how we rebuilt our API in 2 weeks using long-lived workflows. We're bullish on Temporal and would love for you to join us for our debut webinar at 9:30a PT.

Here's the link to register: https://pages.temporal.io/webinar-using-long-lived-workflows...

If you don't have time, no worries, we've wrote about it extensively on our blog!

Exciting times!

Software vendors: “After several months, we finally received our Soc 2 certification!”

Also Software vendor: “Due to a recent security incident, some of our customer data was compromised..”

Wish I knew French. What’s the TLDR in English lol

This.

1. Start with your network first. Be willing to go as far as 3rd-degree connections. 2. Write down your playbook. What is the end goal you are trying to achieve after you have made contact with the prospect? 3. Track feedback, and get quotes on what prospects are saying about the problem you are solving. This becomes great dialog for future prospects since you'll be "speaking their language" and "hitting the nail on the head" around their pain. 4. If you are successful with landing the prospect as the customer, DO NOT forget to ask them if they have peers who are looking to solve the same problem. Referrals are gold.

Latter lol

This would be catchy lol

Thanks for your input. With this approach, is there much work/management needed for the customer?

Lmao!!! Downvotes are a-comin! Lol .. in all seriousness. I respect your skepticism.

Thank you. These are all great questions I need to bring to the table!

Very well said. It is for sure a time suck away from building core features/functionality.

Thank you. I've heard of these guys as well.

Yea, so more like an hourly rate or monthly on-going fee after implementation?

Yea. However I could see a world where for the amount of work, even a 20x premium wouldn't be enough lol

Yes. This could be a good solution. Would mean a lot of back and forth and screen-sharing which could end up painful if you tried to scale this....

I agree with your approach in taking a step back to observe the business case first BEFORE diving into technical discussions. It does get into the weeds and can stretch your resources thin.