Head Business Development

Read This Part First

This is a founder-led B2B SaaS company in the revenue intelligence space. Before the responsibilities, you should understand what you would be joining, because it is not for most people and the people it is for tend to know quickly.

The company is one person. A technical founder who has built the product. There is no sales team, no marketing team, no operations team. You would be the second person.

The company is pre-revenue. The product is built, live, and working. It has not yet been sold to a paying customer. There are no logos, case studies, or reference customers. You would be creating all of them.

There is no established budget line for what this product does. You will not be responding to RFPs or competing in a defined category. You will be explaining why a problem buyers have tolerated is worth paying to solve.

There is no process to inherit. No playbook, no sequences, no deal desk, no pricing committee. You would build these.

You will do your own work. No SDR sourcing your pipeline, no marketing sending leads, no sales engineer on demos, no CS team on onboarding. You prospect, pitch, close, onboard, renew. For a considerable time.

If any of that reads as a problem rather than an opportunity, please stop here. Better now than in month three.

Now the Other Half

Everything above is the cost. Here is what you get for it.

The product exists and works. You are not being hired to sell a roadmap, a prototype, or a founder's ambition. The technology is built and functioning. Your job is commercial, not evangelical — you are not waiting on engineering to make your pitch true.

The founder is technical and shipping. What you learn from buyers goes into the product quickly, because there is no roadmap committee between the conversation and the change. Most GTM leaders spend years fighting for that. Here it is the default.

There is a fixed base, not a commission-only gamble. You are paid a real salary from day one. The variable rewards what you close on top of it — upside, not survival.

The variable has no ceiling and no queue. You are the only commercial person in the company. Every deal is your deal. No territory carve-up, no split credit, no house accounts, no inherited pipeline someone else gets paid on.

The scope will not be taken away from you. You are not building a function that a hired VP will inherit later. The commercial side of this company is yours, and it grows as the company grows. As revenue justifies headcount, you hire and lead that team.

You will not be second-guessed. No layers, no committee, no approvals chain. The autonomy most people at your level spend their careers trying to get back to.

The team stays small deliberately. This is not a company waiting to become large for its own sake. Growth will be deliberate and revenue-led. If your definition of success requires a big org chart, this will frustrate you. If it means building something durable with real ownership of the outcome, it will suit you.

What You Would Own

First revenue — your primary responsibility

• Personally source, pitch, negotiate, and close the first paying customers
• Sell into mid-market and enterprise at a $2,000–$7,500/month contract band
• Validate or break the pricing model against real buyers, and report honestly which it is
• Narrow the ICP based on who actually says yes, not who was supposed to

Building the motion

• Turn what worked into a repeatable, documented process — after it has worked, not before
• Sharpen positioning in-market and feed real objections back into the product
• Build the partnership channel: integration partners, RevOps consultancies, agencies

Running the commercial side

• Own contracts, MSAs, security questionnaires, and procurement
• Onboard and retain the first cohort of customers personally
• Establish the commercial metrics and run a monthly review with the founder
• Define and hire the first people beneath you as revenue justifies it

How You Would Work

• Fully remote, permanently. Not hybrid, not remote-for-now. No office exists.
• Direct line to the founder. Decisions get made in a conversation, not a process.
• High autonomy, high accountability. Nobody manages your calendar or chases your pipeline. The number is the number.
• Asynchronous by default, with scheduled overlap for working sessions and customer calls.

Compensation

Fixed base plus performance-linked variable.

• Fixed: a real monthly salary, paid from day one, reflecting a senior operator at a pre-revenue company. Not commission-only, not deferred, not contingent on you closing first.
• Variable: tied directly to revenue you close and retain. Uncapped. Because you are the only commercial person, there is no split credit and no shared quota — what you bring in is what you are paid on.
• The variable structure will be defined and agreed in writing before you join, not left vague and settled later.

To be direct: the fixed component reflects what a pre-revenue company can responsibly commit to, and the variable is where the real earning sits. Both are negotiable for the right person, and a candidate at this level is expected to negotiate.

Who This Is For

Essential

• 12+ years in B2B SaaS, including real time as an early commercial hire (employee 1–10) or founding GTM at a company you helped take from near-zero to $1M–3M ARR
• Personally closed deals in the $2K–10K/month range — carried a quota, not just managed one
• Sold into revenue leadership: CRO, VP Sales, VP Marketing, RevOps
• Sold a product with no established budget category
• Closed remotely — video-first cycles, deals won without a room
• Comfortable being the only commercial person in a company for an extended period

Strongly preferred

• Background in sales intelligence, intent data, signal-based selling, or RevOps tooling
• Experience building a partner or channel motion from zero

Not the right role if

• Your results have depended on brand recognition or an inbound engine
• You have only operated at Series B and beyond
• You measure your own progress by team size or title
• You need structure or in-person energy to perform
• You want a fixed scope — this role's scope is whatever gets to revenue