Is talking to customers the CEO's job or the CTO's job at an early stage startup?

All founders should - as much as possible. I have heard founders who take customer service calls on a rotation basis during the early stages of a startup.

Definitely both. You need as much feedback as you can get as an early stage startup.

Both, as well as all the early hires. You need to know who you're serving and what impact it's having.

Best idea: set up a weekly round-robin calendar event and tell your team to find opportunities to engage with customers. Schedule those with the round-robin, so that it rotates through all your team members and everyone gets an easy shot at regularly engaging with customers.

Before having a CEO or CTO (however corporate those titles are), the company has to already talked to its customers. So I'd say neither.

I wouldn't think in terms of talking to customers but rather:

• Sales calls
• Customer support
• Customer success
• Customer research
• UX research

Each involve talking but each also involves looking at customers, so who should be looking at customers more? That question doesn't make sense.

Instead, identify all required customer interactions and decide whose the best person to tackle them.

I'm not sure if you can delegate it. Just because even if you C-level it's very easy to try to get positive feedback instead of objective ones

It won't hurt if both do it!

Both (imo)! As CEO, I need to talk to customers to make sure we are providing value and steering our product in the right direction. Our CTO, however, talks to clients for those reasons AND to hear their pain points; whether it be info architecture or functionality. Of course both the CTO and CEO have shared goals when talking to customers but they definitely go in with an ear for different points of feedback.

Both of them.
When we were starting Howitzer, Stefan (CTO) and I, both of us were jumping on calls with our new and existing customers.

There's a simple magic in talking with your existing customers - it motivates you a lot, and you create really valuable connections. We became friends with a few of our first customers, and even hired one of them :)

When it comes to sales - I handled that thing most of the time.

depends on what kind of product is it. If its tech product than CTO should also work as CPO. If it is in industry other than tech than ceo should be the CPO however in the early stage these distinctions are just on paper to split the responsibilty eventually everyone does everything based on the need and time.

All founders (CEO, CTO, COO, CRO, etc), regardless of title should be talking to customers, gathering data, selling, etc! Maybe one is better than the other but being an early stage founder, I think it just comes with the territory! It is also SO good for learnings - hearing from the users themselves on the impact your product has and the problems you're solving. Depending on your role, you can take that feedback and implement it accordingly!

I believe both, CEO and CTO have to have deep knowledge of the problem that comes directly from the customer. However, it may be challenging due to limited resources, especially at the early stage.

I also think both - I agree with @nklvlk - there's magic in talking to your customers. It takes a lot of time, but there's a lot to take away from both your perspectives.

First in best dressed!