900 Sales Calls, Zero Shortcuts: Why Founders Must Sell Their Own Product (Even If It Terrifies Them)
Samplead’s CEO, Dor Vardi, shares how they turned early sales into product breakthroughs and scaled to $1M ARR without a single salesperson, and why early-stage founders must sell their own product.
There’s a seductive myth in the startup world: that if you build a great product, users will come. Raise a seed round, and everything else will fall into place. Sales? That’s someone else’s job - the founder should stay focused on vision, product, or tech.
That myth kills startups. Because in early-stage companies, if you're not selling your product, you're not really building it - you're just guessing. And guessing is a very expensive habit.
So what happens when a founder chooses not to guess, but to sell? Dor Vardi, CEO of Samplead, chose a different path. With no sales team, no VP of Revenue, and no marketing engine ,he initiated over 900 sales calls in just 10 months. It wasn’t glamorous, and it wasn’t scalable - but it worked. Those calls didn’t just generate early traction, they shaped the product itself. Every conversation revealed real needs, challenged assumptions, and brought the team closer to building something people actually wanted.
The MVP That Actually Matters
At some point, nearly every startup hits the same wall: “We need revenue. Let’s hire someone to sell”. A promising VP of Sales joins the team, often hired for their U.S. market expertise. You burn through $200,000 on salary, flights, dinners, CRMs, and campaigns. Six months later: you realize there’s no pipeline, no traction, no meaningful learning, and still no real sales.
It’s not necessarily the hire’s fault, it’s the stage. Early sales aren't only about closing deals; they’re also about figuring out what the deal is in the first place. You’re not optimizing CAC, you’re still discovering who your customer is and what they actually care about. And that’s a job only founders can do.
Dor understood this. He didn’t outsource or delegate. Instead, he went all in - not because he loved sales (though, he does), but because he needed answers. Over the course of 900 calls, he kept hearing the same pain points echoed across companies. He tweaked messaging on the fly, sat with engineers that same night to adjust the UX, and treated every conversation like a product sprint in disguise.
That effort taught him more than any roadmap ever could:
What customers actually needed (vs. what they said they wanted)
What messaging triggered real engagement
Which features were make-or-break, and which didn’t matter
Where the product fell short, and how to fix it
And most of all: what not to build
From Swag to Sales Intelligence
The journey didn’t start with AI, it started with coffee mugs. Back when they were just two founders looking for a way in, they began by sending personalized swag to HR leaders and simply asking for feedback. No hard sell, no hidden agenda, Just “tell us what you think”. It worked, with over 10% conversion rate from samples to paying customers - because it felt personal.
Then COVID hit, and the swag business disappeared overnight. The team pivoted quickly, launching an SDR-as-a-service agency to help B2B companies book outbound meetings. It wasn’t a detour, but a move into their customers’ world. They treated it like a lab: hundreds of interactions across industries, patterns emerging over time, and one central question guiding the work: how can outbound be made smarter?
Build It Through Selling, Not Spreadsheets
Samplead wasn’t built in a boardroom, it was built in the field. The team spent months deep in the trenches, running outbound campaigns for real companies, across real use cases, to figure out what actually works. Their biggest insight? The future of outbound isn’t about volume, it’s about timing. Companies need to shift from mass outreach to trigger-based outbound: engaging the right prospects at the right moment, with messages that truly resonate.
To make that possible at scale, Samplead uses AI-powered agents to handle the manual, repetitive work - not to replace humans, but to amplify them, freeing teams to focus on what matters most: building real relationships.
But they didn’t start building until the pain was clear and consistent. Dor’s philosophy is simple: don’t guess what customers want. Test, fail, observe - and only then, build. While others raised millions on a pitch, the company took a different approach. They waited until they passed $240K in ARR, with a product still closer to prototype than platform, before expanding. And when they hit $1M in ARR, it was without a single full-time salesperson.
Would a VP of Sales have helped them move faster? Maybe. But they would have missed the insights that shaped the product. Because even the best sales hire won’t rewrite the pitch after every call or push a UX fix at midnight. A founder will, because their goal isn’t to hit quota. It’s to build something that works.
If you're building something, sell it before you scale it. The real insights don't live in your deck, they live in the market.
About Samplead
Samplead is a trigger-based outbound platform that helps B2B companies book more meetings by reaching the right prospects at the right moment. By detecting buyer intent across channels like LinkedIn, Reddit, GitHub, podcasts, financial reports, and more, Samplead enables timely, personalized outreach that feels like a conversation - not a cold pitch. The platform empowers teams to run executive-level outbound at scale, turning any employee into a high-performing SDR through AI, automation, and smart targeting.
Founded in 2022 by Dor Vardi, Gadi Vardi, and Yotam Nahum, Samplead has helped dozens of fast-growing startups build pipelines and grow revenue - without growing headcount.
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