Good morning, fellow founder! 👋

Welcome to another edition of FounderForge. Your Europe-focused startup digest - just because we do things a little differently here! 🇺🇸 👀

If you missed our last issue, you can still read it at the link below! 👇

Today's topics are all about starting and growing:

• First Hires 🫂 

• How to Find Your Beachhead Market 🏖️ 

📊 Data Dive: First Hires

🤔 Who to hire as the first employee?

This question will come up as soon as you are drowning in work as a founding team. 👨‍💻

Employees will help you grow and scale your business. Choosing your first hires can give you immense speed or slow you down. 🐌

To help you with this decision we broke down the data from Lenny’s newsletter that were gathered from top B2B SaaS companies.

Who to hire as employee #1

This is not surprising - many teams hire an engineer first. Even if you have a technical co-founder, hiring an engineer will speed up your time to market. 🐇

That said, customer success is also a common first hire. After all, customers are the most important thing you have. 🙋‍♀️

The first three hires

As the first three check in, additional product roles are added to the engineering roles.

But also sales and general experts become more important. At a certain point, you just have to start selling. 🤑

Depending on the business, companies also hire some specialists like data scientists or recruiting experts. 🤓

The first 10 hires

If you see a team of 10+ people, your startup has some traction and probably a working product on its way to market. 📈

Not surprisingly, sales is now becoming more important in hiring. Product team roles are still relevant as 2/3 of companies are working on the product. 📲

BONUS: What were the first hires across top B2B startups:

Learning from others is a proven strategy for drawing early conclusions. 👀

In the newsletter, very prominent companies are also cited as data sources and included in a separate chart:

What were your first hires? Just reply to this email with your answer!

🛠 Founder's Toolkit: Finding your Beachhead Market

Launching a product is all about focus - you need to focus on a specific customer profile and make progress over time. 🧘

The Beachhead Market method is a great way to focus on a specific customer segment while selling your product.

The Concept

The beachhead strategy was a military tactic. 🪖

You land on a "beachhead" and capitalize on a small frontier area, which then becomes a stronghold from which you can advance into the next area.

In business, you can make a small customer segment or market niche your beachhead - that's where you should launch your product and build your stronghold. 💪

From there, you can move on to a larger audience.

Define your Beachhead Market

When you launch your product, you already talk to tons of customers to validate the problem your product solves. 🗣️

Now it's time to find your customers. 🔎

Characteristics of a good beachhead market

• Customers already purchase similar products 🧾

• Customers have similar sales cycles 🔄

• Word-of-mouth communication is done between customers 👥

With this in mind, you can focus on the geography where you want to launch your product. 🌎

Find your customers using the customer validation personas and see where similar customers hang out and talk to each other.

Why start small

When you launch your product, you ultimately want to progress to product market fit.

A quick way to get to product-market fit is with a military strength focus. With the beachhead market strategy, you focus absolutely on a small set of customers and what they want. 🫡

You can easily respond to small adjustments in your product.

As you focus on areas where other customers hang out, growth will take care of itself. 📈

Limitations

It's all about the right market size. If your niche is too small and/or your beachhead market is too small, you won't be able to scale and iterate from here. 🔂

Sometimes it's okay to change customer segments or beachhead markets - after all, the power is in the focus and in scaling from a market segment you understand. 💡

Now it’s your turn - take your market share! 📊

🤩 FounderForge X Entrepreneurship Avenue

The Entrepreneurship Avenue is Europe's largest student-focused and student-organized startup event series taking place in Vienna.

They are basically preparing the future generation of founders to become what could be the next big thing! 🚀

We at FounderForge want to give back to the community! 🤗

So together with EA we have organized a small event where we will help the best teams to make their pitches skyrocket before the grand finale on June 4th! 💪

Don't miss out on the next generation of entrepreneurs and get your ticket to the final conference here. 👀

Let's give them the tools they need to accelerate their businesses! 📈

🔗 Founder's Library: Curated Resources

A collection of random reads that the FounderForge team enjoyed.

• Dear Europe, Please Wake Up – EU/ACC by Andres Klinger

• 11 Powerful Referral Strategies That Will Supercharge Your Sales, According to Experts by Marc Wayshak

• The Founder’s Guide to Creating a Culture of Connection by Dr. Carl Nassar

• How Stephen Networked to Grow a Six-Figure Consulting Business by Stephen Steers

• The Most Underrated Technique to Turn New Signups Into Power Users by Yaakov Carno

😂 Meme of the Fortnight

Startup life is tough - make it a marathon you enjoy … 🏃 

🤔 Your Thoughts on Today's Edition

• 🔥 It was great!

• 😒 Meh - it was okay.

• 👎 Not interesting to me.

That's all for now!

If you find this newsletter valuable, share it with a friend!

Cheers,
The Founders Blacksmith 👋

Issue #18 | 16. May 2024