Pricing, positioning, and deciding who the product is for is a full job. If nobody owns it in year one, those decisions still get made, by whoever happens to be in the room.
Why the Product Is Rarely the Thing That Fails
You can watch the pattern run in real time. Someone builds a genuinely good product. The architecture is clean, the technical decisions hold up, and a few respected developers say so publicly. The team reads that as validation, because it is the only kind of feedback they have been trained to recognize. Then the revenue doesn’t move, trials don’t convert, and the customers who do sign up are the ones who were always going to find it eventually. The response is almost always to build more, because building is the lever this team knows how to pull.
Nothing is technically wrong. But what’s missing is a function. Nobody in the company owns the price, the position, the definition of who the product is for, or the route by which it reaches those people.
Companies in this market rarely die of exotic causes, they die of ordinary ones, and this is the most ordinary one there is. And it sneaks up on you. It doesn’t present itself as an emergency in year one, which is exactly why it goes untreated. And every month the seat stays empty, those decisions get made anyway, by whoever happens to be in the room.
The Commercial Seat Is a Founding Decision
Commercial capability is not a hire you schedule for later. It shapes what gets built, in what order, and for whom. A company with someone accountable for revenue in the first year asks different questions in that year, and different questions produce a different product.
There is one honest exception. If you have built something nobody else can build, scarcity does the selling, at least, for a while. In that position you can survive without commercial discipline longer than you deserve to.
But the reality is that most products are not in that position. A form plugin, a Shopify extension, another page builder: the technical distance to the nearest competitor is small and the number of competitors is large. When the technical edge is thin, the outcome is decided by pricing, positioning, distribution and of course sales, which is precisely the part that was postponed.
Greyd.Suite was not a product built on the side of an agency. Greyd was founded as its own company, with its own financing, and with the commercial side staffed from the start, because that experience came out of a management career rather than out of client projects. And that determined which questions were on the table in the first year, which meant the product never had to argue for budget against client work that was earning money that month.
What the Commercial Questions Actually Decide
Take one of them, price, and follow it through.
A customer moving to a product that costs 300 € a year does exactly as much work as a customer moving to one that costs 300 € a month. Same migration, same relearning, same internal discussion, same risk of choosing wrong.
That single number then sets the shape of the whole company:
How many customers you need before revenue becomes predictable, which at the low end runs into the hundreds of thousands
Whether you can afford a sales function at all, or whether growth depends permanently on people finding you by themselves
Whether support can be handled by a person or has to be pushed into documentation
How long you survive a quarter in which new business stalls
None of that is recoverable by building a better product. It was settled the day the price went on the website, usually by instinct and usually without anyone in the company being responsible for the decision.
The Plan to Hire Someone Later Sets Your Business Up for Failure
The usual objection is that this is a question of sequence. Build first, get some revenue, then bring in a commercial lead once there is something to sell.
By the time you can afford that person, the pricing is public, the customer base has assembled itself out of whoever happened to arrive, and the roadmap reflects two years of feature requests from customers you should not have taken. You’ve already shot yourself in the foot.
Because here’s what happens next. You finally hire that person to build a commercial function. The reality is that you’re hiring them to reverse decisions the founders are personally attached to. And worse, you’re doing so without giving them the authority to do it. Capable people turn that job down. The ones who accept it tend to not have skin in the game.
If you genuinely can’t find a commercial co-founder, the answer isn’t to derive the discipline yourself from first principles. Pricing, positioning and distribution have been studied for a century and the conclusions are written down and cheap to obtain. Buy the knowledge, give the role a name and a place in the calendar. And then hold it to the same standard you hold engineering to.
None of this requires a founder who enjoys the commercial side. What it requires is someone who has noticed that the seat is empty.
