Understand Builders and Sellers relationship in a SaaS Business

Learn to Sell, Learn to Build. If you can do both you are unstoppable - Naval

Every SaaS startup with two founders has one person who builds and one person who sells.

In wide definition, CTOs/Engineers are the Builders, and CEOs/Marketers are the Sellers.

In recent times, the position of a Builder is the highly in-demand, and also the most difficult position to fill. A perfect Builder-Seller relationship offers long-term growth of the business in these factors :

• Customers satisfaction with the quality of products and services delivered by the company
• Well managed culture and structure of the organization
• Departments and Managers start getting fruitful results.

A Seller should understand the objectives that the Builder has to accomplish. Similarly, a Builder should be aware of the Seller’s goals, and the obstacle they need to overcome together while running and growing a business.

The builder's role in the SaaS business is as important as the Seller's. The responsibility of a builder is to help build the company’s tech vision, explore tech strategies, and ensure it is aligned with the company’s business needs. 🧑‍💻

On the other end, Sellers are business-minded and want to grow the business with rocket-high $MRR. Some Builders are too business-minded but not all as they slightly may need to.

A seller should help the builder to possess a business-minded approach because the builder needs to contribute to product development by exploring technical solutions to business problems (including the company’s competitive advantage and USP).🤝

As a Builder, you must be able to constantly balance the need to refactor, improve the codebase/test scope, etc. with the need to drive ahead with new functionality. 💻

A Builder must be a confident and clear communicator with the engineers, and other departments across the business to ensure relevant tech information is shared appropriately when needed. 📞

If a Builder or Seller unknowingly messes up, instead of blaming each other, they should work alongside, and take the bullet for each other when any one of them messes up.

Thank you for reading it.