Zack Urlocker’s Post

Most startups fail because they don’t know how to close deals. As Co-Founder and CEO of Mobly, I've built and led sales teams that have collectively closed over $50M in ARR. I'm receiving many DMs from founders seeking guidance on building sales teams, lead capture strategies, and achieving startup exits. So, I've opened up 5 exclusive 1:1 mentorship slots on Intro What can we cover together? ✔️ Going from 0 to 1 ✔️ Fundraising advice ✔️ How to make your first sales hire ✔️ Sales operations + leadership tips Honored to be on @Intro alongside world-class experts like Zack Urlocker (former COO at Zendesk), @Marc Cohen (Global multi-billion dollar international leader), Edo Perry (CEO & Co-Founder ELEMENTS, Climatech Expert) & Megan Cunningham (Personal brand-builder. Clients: Airbnb, Google, Apple, Amazon & more). Comment “interested” and secure your spot now: intro.co/ZachBarney

Turning a brilliant startup idea into a billion-dollar IPO is a dream many of us share, but a rare reality. 1 in 5 startups fail before the end of the first year. One of the key culprits? Having a poor product-market fit. Here’s what that looks like: ⚠️ Sales plod along, even with a skilled sales team ⚠️ High customer churn ⚠️ Zero organic growth or spontaneous customer referrals and discussions ⚠️ High customer acquisition costs and marketing inefficiencies ⚠️ Customer feedback reveals unmet needs or consistent issues ⚠️ Team morale is down due to lack of progress Take heart if you're noticing these signals. Achieving product-market fit isn't always a direct route. It’s often a winding path with many stops and starts. Here’s how to find your way: truly listen to your customers. They’re likely to lead you in the right direction.

🎙️ We've interviewed one of our outstanding mentors, Mike Donohue: https://hubs.la/Q02pBN960. 🚀 Startup sales leader from early Square (IPO), VP of Worldwide Sales at Leanplum, and Head of Go-To-Market at PayPal, he's got extensive hands-on experience with sustainable growth: 🎤 'Anyone who's like a master of their craft is really good at breaking down a complex task into individual steps. I encourage founders to become excellent at each individual step, not just at closing deals, but all of the activities of the stage they're in.' ✨ In this feature, he shares insights on preparing for startups that are on the path of scaling their business, starting with the mindset and going into practical recommendations that touch on following first principles, and following repeatable patterns & behaviors that lead to success. #mentor #accelerator #sales #growth #scaling #startupgrowth

When I was building my first startup back in 2017... We were growing month over month but still had a massive problem with our operations. Eventually this caused us to hit a plateau and ultimately shut the business down. No matter how great our front end was... Our backend couldn't support the growth. This led me to diving into the world of operations and automation. And when I launched my second startup, we placed an emphasis on our operations from the start. We were one of the most efficient teams on our market. And it's why we were able to grow the company and exit it within 3 years. Don't get me wrong... Sales & Marketing matter. It's the lifeblood of a business. But having a strong operating system is what will take you all the way. It will help you create a true moat. Beyond just being able to acquire new customers. Take this as your sign to focus on becoming the most efficient business in your marketplace.

How important is it for founders to market and sell? Very! If you are an early stage startup founder and you are not spending most of your time on finding customer or building awareness of your product or service, you’ll probably fail. Harsh, but true. Almost everything else can wait, including hiring, more product development, fundraising, etc.. Figure out how to market and sell your stuff and everything else gets about 100x easier.

The Fastest Growing Startup in History?? 🤯 They grew from $1 million to $100 million in ARR in about 20 months. These are some of the lessons I learnt from Deel's story. 1) No one cares if you fail. Start now. 2) There's a difference between YOUR dream product and what the customer WANTS. 3) Get things done and get them done fast with the best care for your customer. 4) You can pivot your target customer as well, not just your product offering. 5) Build trust & KPI models to manage team performance. Ultimately, it really comes down to answering one key question: What problem are you solving for the customer? As an entrepreneur in the B2B SaaS space, I'm really inspired by what Alex Bouaziz & Shuo Wang have built at Deel. Well done! 👏 👏👏

We’re fully deployed out of MKT1 Capital, fund 1! So what’s next? Over the course of the last 4 years, I’m so proud of what we’ve built at MKT1. We started advising early stage founders & marketers on how to build their marketing team and strategy. From there, we saw a huge gap in the market—most founders don’t know marketing and most investors don’t know marketing. To build a massive company, you have to be able to win on both product AND go-to-market. We built a fund on the thesis that the best product isn’t enough—you need marketing advantages, things innate within the business that will help you grow faster (think network effects, a wedge in, founder/market fit story, etc). We’ve invested in 34 companies who fit this mold and are excited to support them as they grow. A few months back, we started talking about the next chapter for MKT1. The past 4 years have shown us what we love to do—for me, that is investing in and working with the best founders. I’m excited to continue investing in early stage companies as a partner on the investment team at Pear VC. Why Pear? I’ve known Pejman and Mar for many years and have long admired what they’ve built. There are a lot of similarities in the ways Pear supports founders with an in-house talent team that helps founders make their first few hires and an in-house GTM team that helps founders go from zero to 1 on the GTM side. They have built a strong track record and team to support founders in the early stages of building a company and I’m excited to be part of this next chapter of the firm. Thank you! Finally, a huge thank you to the founders who took a bet on us as a new fund- we are so happy to be on this journey with you. And to our LPs who put their faith in us as first time fund managers to pick great companies (and make you money!). What does this mean for MKT1? We will continue supporting our portfolio founders. I will move to Pear to keep investing and Emily will continue writing the MKT1 Newsletter and will advise growth to late stage companies on marketing. 

When startup founders gather, they talk about one thing: REVENUE. ✨ How did you get your recent sale? Who gave the lead? Which event? Which orgs made the intro? The rest are secondary: Who's your recent hire? Which accelerators gave value? What's the deal with this VC? What's the tea with this founder? So if you truly support a startup, give them SALES. :D That's it.

2 founders of a startup valued over $40M are scaling their sales team and proactively looking to improve their chances of success There are things to do and things not to do It's helpful to know why teams fail so you can avoid those mistakes

When I started my second business, I made this wrong assumption. We expected to earn 30x more per customer (ACV) than we saw in reality after 3 years into the business. Luckily, this wrong assumption didn't kill the business. As you can imagine, we had to adapt everything, but I believe we set up a good and healthy company. It will probably never become a startup with huge growth potential (as we dreamed about at the beginning), but I'm still proud of how it evolved. Starting my 3rd company, I'm curious what wrong assumptions we are making now. We'll figure this out in a few years I guess. Until then, we need to make sure we solve real problems and I'm confident we'll make it work again. What were the wrong assumptions you made?