Dear CEOs, Get Input Early

There’s a quote from a recent SaaStr piece that stuck with me:

“Most first-time founders today can do everything — code, sell, support, upsell, even hack marketing. And so they keep doing everything, even after they hire people.”

It’s true. Not because founders crave control, but because early-stage companies require founders to be deeply hands-on in product, sales, and marketing. Those are the natural areas of focus.

But there’s one area that gets far less early attention, even in great companies: Post-sale. You know, that part of the business that determines renewals, expansion, customer health, and long-term revenue.

It’s not because CEOs are overlooking it. It’s just because, in the first few million of ARR, post-sale simply isn’t where they’ve spent the most time.

That’s normal and expected, but as the company matures, it becomes a problem if nothing changes.

Founders have strong instincts for product and sales because they’ve lived those motions every day. But post-sale is different:

• Value delivery happens across many touchpoints.

• Signals can be quieter and more subtle.

• Problems don’t shout, they accumulate.

• Risk shows up months before revenue loss does.

• And customer sentiment rarely matches customer health.

By the time churn shows up in the numbers, it’s been happening invisibly for a while.

Not because the CEO missed anything, but because post-sale visibility just works differently than sales or product visibility.

This is where outside input makes a huge difference. Not necessarily a hire or major investment, just an objective perspective from someone who knows what to look for:

• Where value is (and isn’t) being delivered

• What customer health actually looks like

• Where teams unintentionally rely on the founder

• How much onboarding impacts future renewals

• Which accounts are quietly drifting

That perspective can come from:

• A trusted coach or seasoned advisor

• A peer founder who’s been through it

• An experienced fractional leader

• Even a colleague with bandwidth to dig in

The format doesn’t matter. What does is having someone not immersed in the day-to-day bring clarity to the parts of the customer journey that are hardest to see from too close up.

The goal? To create confidence…

• to know where the post-sale engine is strong.

• to hand things off without fear of surprises.

• to prepare the environment for future leaders.

• that customers are actually getting the value the product promises.

When CEOs get this clarity early, scaling becomes far more predictable, far more profitable, and far less stressful.