Product-Led Growth: Let the Product Do the Selling

A startup sells a $29/month screenshot-annotation tool. Signups are decent, but conversion to paid feels slow — so the founders do what "serious" companies do: they hire two sales reps at $6,000/month each to demo the product and chase trials over Zoom.

Quarter results: the reps closed 41 deals. That's $12,000/month in sales cost for about $1,189/month in new MRR — every closed customer needs roughly 10 months just to pay back their share of one month of sales salaries.