# You are the first sales hire. There is no SDR team, no playbook, and a pipeline target the founders wrote on a whiteboard. > Hellofew for founding sales hires. You are the first seller, with no SDRs, no playbook and a target. Agents find your buyers, write each note from their profile and send from your own account. They hired you to prove that someone other than the founders can sell this. You have a product that is still changing, a market that is still being figured out, and a quota. You also have your own LinkedIn account, which is the one channel that came with you to this job and will come with you to the next one. The playbook says hire SDRs and buy a sequencing tool. You do not have the SDRs, and the sequencing tools want you to send at a volume that turns your profile into a spam channel — the profile you will still need when this startup becomes a line on it. Hellofew does the prospecting an SDR would, from your account, at a pace you would sign your name to. You paste the product page; agents write the ICP, find matching people, read their profile and posts, and draft one note each. You approve every message. It sends slowly, follows up once, and stops when anyone replies. ![A working week for founding sales hires: Pipeline review, Three demos, Pricing call w/ CEO, Security questionnaire — and outbound, moved or skipped 3 times.](https://hellofew.com/solutions/founding-sales-hires/images/week.png) ## What actually goes wrong ### You are closing and prospecting with the same eight hours Demos and follow-ups fill the day, so prospecting happens at night or not at all. Then the pipeline empties, and the demos stop, and the whiteboard number looks further away. **What happens instead:** The agents search, read and write every weekday. Your part is approving up to 25 people each morning, each with the reason they were picked and a draft already written. ### The ICP is a guess, and you are supposed to validate it Nobody knows yet exactly who buys. The founders have hunches. You need a way to test titles and angles quickly without burning through the market. **What happens instead:** The ICP is a text box you edit — titles, positioning, three angles. Every lead shows a fit score broken into its parts, and your skips show you where the targeting is wrong. Replies, reported every Monday, are the test. ### Your LinkedIn is your career, not the company's asset When you move on, the account goes with you. So does your reputation with every buyer you messaged. A restriction, or a reputation for spam, follows you to the next role. **What happens instead:** A hard ceiling of 20 invitations a day, reached over a three-week ramp from 5. If acceptance drops, the cap halves; if it keeps dropping, inviting stops before LinkedIn acts. Much safer than the category — never risk-free, and the limits are published so you can check. ### You will be asked for numbers, and they had better be honest The founders want to know what is working. A tool that reports thousands of invitations sent makes a nice chart and tells them nothing. **What happens instead:** The Monday digest leads with replies, the only number that matters, and on a quiet week it says why. No vanity metrics to explain away. ## What your morning looks like instead One card per person: who they are, what the message was written from, and the message itself. Approve, skip, or edit. Nothing goes out that you have not read. ![An approval card: Aisha Bello, Head of People at a 300-person retail chain head office. Written from: Her post: "Onboarding 40 store managers a quarter on a shared Google Doc is not a system.". Draft: "Aisha — agreed, a shared Google Doc is not a system for onboarding store managers. I'm the first sales hire at a small company that fixes exactly that for multi-site retail. Can I show you what it replaced for a chain your size?" With Approve, Skip and Edit buttons. An invented person.](https://hellofew.com/solutions/founding-sales-hires/images/queue.png) *An illustration. The person is invented.* Typical titles the agents would look for: Head of Operations, VP of Finance, Director of IT, Head of People, Chief Operating Officer, Operations Director. Yours are written from your own page, and you edit them. ## Your first month 1. Paste your company's product page and read the ICP it writes. Edit it to match what the founders believe and what you have heard on calls. Free, no card. 2. Subscribe at $49/month and connect your own LinkedIn account. About a minute later, up to 25 people appear, each with a draft written from their profile. 3. Approve three and it starts: 5 invitations a day, building over three weeks towards 20. Nothing sends that you did not read. 4. Replies land in one inbox and stop the queue for that person. The Monday digest reports replies — the number to take to the founders. ![Invitations per day over the first four weeks: a slow ramp that never crosses the daily ceiling, held under a rolling weekly ceiling, with nothing on weekends.](https://hellofew.com/solutions/founding-sales-hires/images/ramp.png) ## Who this is wrong for If you need activity logged in Salesforce or HubSpot, there is no CRM sync — you would be copying replies across by hand. If the plan is to hire three SDRs next quarter and run them all from one tool, this is one account for one person. And if leadership wants hundreds of touches a week, the caps will not bend. ## Questions **Does it sync with our CRM?** No. It runs one LinkedIn account and keeps its own ledger of everyone contacted and every reply. If CRM sync is a requirement, a tool built for sales teams is the better choice. **Whose account does it use?** Yours, connected by you on LinkedIn's own sign-in page. The account must be yours; we never see the password. **Can the company pay for it?** Yes, it is a normal subscription at $49/month with no contract. It is still tied to one person's LinkedIn account. ## Start Paste your page at https://hellofew.com/signup and read what it writes about your market — free, no card. $49/month when you connect LinkedIn. ## Related - [B2B SaaS](https://hellofew.com/solutions/b2b-saas.md) - [Technical founders of B2B SaaS](https://hellofew.com/solutions/technical-founder-b2b-saas.md) - [Solo founders](https://hellofew.com/solutions/solo-founders.md) - [B2B fintech](https://hellofew.com/solutions/b2b-fintech.md)