- If you're a SaaS Founder
and you're starting this company
and you're growing this company,
at some point in time one of you,
whether you have two co-Founders or more,
or maybe you're a solo Founder,
you're gonna have to make that decision on,
all right, I'm gonna call myself CEO.
And I personally had to go through this decision myself on,
when do I call myself CEO?
And when do I just be the Founder?
What does the company need?
And so in growing my last company, ToutApp,
I went through this journey of being a solo Founder
to building a team,
to being a CEO,
to selling the company.
And I went through some tough changes along the way.
So in this episode I'm gonna walk you through
the three principles.
And I'm wanna do this video a little bit differently,
I haven't scripted this,
I just wanted to speak from the heart
because this is a topic really important to me
and I think a lot of Founders struggle with this.
So I'm just gonna go through my notes
that I made one by one.
So I'm gonna walk you through the three principles
and the three stages that you're gonna go through
on turning from Founder to CEO.
So if you're excited to dig in,
smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm,
and also if you're new,
I drop an episode like this every Sunday
with actionable strategies from the trenches
on building SaaS companies.
So hit that subscribe button and that bell icon
and let's dig into it.
Intro.
Okay, so the first stage of building a company,
this is the super early stages.
One of the things that,
I didn't learn this the hard way,
I just kind of felt it from the beginning
and it proved true to me was I didn't call myself CEO.
One of the rules that I had was like,
look, when it's like a, just me, I was a solo Founder,
or when it's just a four person team or seven person team,
there's nothing to chiefly execute over.
Like there's no CEO, you're basically a Founder.
And if you have Co-Founders,
you're a bunch of Co-Founders.
And what you need to be focusing on
is not so much the title,
but really what needs to be done.
So the first principle is that don't call yourself a CEO
until you have something to chiefly execute over.
And this served me well,
because I would just introduce myself as a Founder.
When I was recruiting,
I would just introduce myself as a Founder.
This proved really well
for recruiting great early employees,
and I heard this from early employees
and talking with them over the years,
we're still friends that, you know,
it meant a lot that you were in there in the trenches.
You weren't this like her person that was CEO
and you weren't in it with us,
especially in such an early stage in such an early team.
Even on my business card, I just put Founder.
And even now in all the companies that I run,
I just put myself as Founder.
They're not big enough in these new stages
to chiefly execute over anything.
And so the reason this is important is because
I felt that, and as I've met other Founders,
I've met Founders that are like, you know,
just them or they're just their Co-Founders
and they're like fighting over
you're CEO and I'm CTO and this and that.
I get it to incorporate in Delaware
you need to actually put down some decisions,
but don't put it on your business card.
Don't put it on your email signature
because in that early stage,
what's really important is that you own that role
of just being a Founder.
Which means that you are doing sales
and you're doing marketing
and you're doing product
and you're doing code
and you're talking to investors
and you're talking to customers
and you're customer support.
And that's it.
And that's like, you just need to be owning that.
And I think that as much as people say,
titles don't matter,
titles do matter that's why people fight over them.
That's why it's top of mind.
That's why people check them.
They check the length of them
and if they have certain names in it, they do matter.
And I think as a Founder,
the biggest principle that served me well,
this is principle number zero is,
just like, be a Founder, don't worry about it.
Don't worry about the title in the early stages.
That's principle zero.
Principle one, the next principle.
And I have it in my notes here
is when you go from just you guys or gals
being co-Founders and Founders to you have something
and you start to hire some people.
And in this stage, you know, let's just say,
maybe you hire a demand gen person
and you hire a support person and you hire a salesperson.
It's super important to also not again, call yourself CEO.
And this manifests itself in multiple ways
because I got the urge to do it
and I'm like, nope, not gonna do that.
What I'm gonna call myself,
I call myself chief Happiness Officer,
that's literally what it said in my email title.
And I put that because we hired
a bunch of Happiness Officers,
they were responsible for onboarding.
Our people where product led growth in the beginning
and then we moved to sales driven.
And even in those early stages,
everyone was called a Happiness Officer.
So I'm like, okay, I'm the Chief Happiness Officer.
And the reason I did that was
because there does come a point,
let's just say you start selling into bigger companies
and you are, you know, recruiting some like,
little bit more experienced people.
They wanna know that there's someone owning
and owning the responsibility
for where this company's going.
Or if there's three Co-Founders,
they want to know who's the single person,
that's a single throat to choke.
And so even in that stage,
when I was hiring more doers,
but not managers or leads or anything like that,
I stepped up to the role, like, look,
someone's gotta manage these people and lead these people
and someone's gotta be the face of the company.
So I will be Chief Happiness Officer, but still not CEO.
And that was also important because the reality was
in that stage while I was managing people,
I was still responsible for a number
of things in the company.
If I didn't show up to work for a week,
then a bunch of code wouldn't get written
or certain deals wouldn't get closed,
like I was still doing.
And this is something that Paul Graham calls
the Maker and Manager Schedule.
And this is one of the toughest parts of being a Founder,
because in this stage,
what's essentially happening is,
you are trying to follow a schedule
where you're managing a bunch of people
and you're also trying to do work.
And the context switching between the two can be super hard.
Like if you're coding
and all of a sudden your Happiness Officer
actually needs help on a support ticket
or production goes down.
You know, it's really hard to switch out of that.
That context switching is really hard.
And so I gave myself another name,
I said, Chief Happiness Officer and Founder.
And I would have days where I would just be a Founder
and do what was needed to actually follow
that maker schedule.
And then I would have other days
where I would put on the hat and say,
cool, I'm gonna be Chief Happiness Officer,
let me make sure that all the support tickets
are getting handled,
all the customers or people in the pipeline
we're actually talking to.
And in those cases showing up as,
hey, I'm the Chief Happiness Officer,
A, it got like a little bit of a reaction
and they're like, okay, I'm talking so important.
Also it wasn't like I'm CEO.
It's like, what are you doing on this call?
How small are you guys?
So it kind of helped level set
that middle stage where it's a little awkward
where maybe it's you and your Co-Founders
and like three or four people that you started to hire.
And so principle number one,
or if zero and then one.
Why keep index cards
but I wanted to do it slightly differently
and just speak from the heart.
Was, you know, just give yourself a different name
that means something to you.
Maybe that's Chief Sales Officer or Chief Revenue Officer,
or maybe it's Sales Director,
or maybe it's Chief Bottle Washer, I don't know.
But it's partly for the team
and your customers to show that,
hey, there's a different role,
but partly also to remind you
that you're wearing two hats in this stage.
There's the manager schedule and the maker schedule,
and that will likely help you
really manage your time in the right way.
One of the biggest pitfalls I see in this stage
is I've seen Founders,
and this is obviously something really
near and dear to my heart,
mainly because I've seen so many Founders struggle on this
is one of the first things they want to give away the hat on
and say, oh, we hired a marketing person.
I don't need to think about go-to-market anymore.
Or we hired a sales person,
they're gonna take care of all the deals.
That's one of the biggest mistakes
you can make in this second stage
where you're starting to hire some people
but there's no clear leader to own sales
or marketing or product.
You're still the Chief Product Officer.
You are still the Chief Sales Officer.
You are still the VP of Sales or the VP of Marketing.
You are still that because you haven't hired for that,
but you may be hiring some junior people
or some mid-level people, nothing against them,
I know some of you watch this as well.
You would want your Founder
to own this piece and recognize that.
And by the way, there is a title for that,
someone that owns those functions
because there's no VPs for it yet, it's called Founder.
Like that's literally what it is,
which is why you so wanna hold onto that
and make that your primary title.
And so that's really the big thing you want to think about
because what is the right stage
where you're just purely Founder,
because nothing to chiefly execute over.
And then what is the stage where you're managing
and making and you're wearing multiple hats?
And how do you give yourself a title
for when you're managing
and how do you give yourself a title
for when you're still doing?
And it's not CEO still
'cause you know, there's nothing to chiefly execute over.
So once you get through those two stages,
then you get into this third stage.
And this is probably the stage
I struggled with the most in shifting,
for a non-obvious reason
that only after selling the company
and looking back and having drinks with
prior people that we had on the team,
I really, really understood.
I'll tell you why that is in a second,
but let me describe this third stage.
The third stage is, you know,
you start with just Co-Founders and you get the product,
you get some initial revers.
then you hire some people and you get some leverage,
and you're doing the maker and manager schedule,
you're the Chief Happiness Officer.
Then you get into a stage, you know,
maybe you raise a series A or a C plus round,
and you start to hire some leaders in the company.
Maybe you'll hire a Director of Marketing
to really own a piece or a VP of Marketing.
Maybe you hire a VP of Sales.
Those are really the two big roles you wanna prioritize
before you hire for anything else, in my opinion.
And we can debate that in the comments.
But once you do that,
then you start to actually take a pile of work and say,
awesome, you are now in charge of this.
This is a whole new stage
where you are really shifting from doing to managing.
And more importantly, you are really shifting to leading.
And this is where,
while there's always gonna be a role for the Founder,
this is where CEO is really important
because every person in the leadership team,
someone that's owning a function
is gonna have to be managed,
coached, and guided by the CEO.
And it's gotta be one person that really owns it
and gets dangerous enough in it
to be able to manage that person.
Now, this doesn't mean that you should be
as good of a VP of Marketing person as your VP of Marketing,
it means that you have to be dangerous enough at it
to be able to know whether they're doing good or bad,
and you should also have enough or lack of an ego
to hire someone that's better than you.
You wanna be hiring VPs and Directors
that are better than you.
You actually want that because they'll up level you,
but you also want to have some domain knowledge
in their function so you can actually manage them.
And that in itself becomes a full-time job.
And in this stage where you finally start
calling yourself CEO,
you really transition from Founder to CEO.
There's two big pitfalls that I learned the hard way.
And I see a lot of Founders struggle with this
and so I don't want you to, as you go through this.
The first pitfall is where you have so much of an ego
that you actually want to remain
the best in the company at that role.
So let's just say, you know,
you are the Founder that also closes deals
or you're the Founder that also manages product.
And you're like, you know what, no one can do what I do.
And you almost limit yourself
in hiring someone better than you,
not because you can't recruit that person
or that person doesn't exist,
you just don't believe someone better can be out there
because you think you're so great.
And in fact, this is why it's so important
for you to switch from Founder to CEO
because while you were a Founder
your job was to be really great
at a bunch of different things
and that's what you are rewarded for.
But when you switch to CEO,
your job is to be great at one thing
and that's to recruit and lead the best people
that are better than you.
And unless you come to terms with the fact
that you're no longer gonna be the smartest person
in the company for that discipline,
whether it's marketing or sales or product or engineering,
you will falter and you will hire people
that are worse than you,
and then they will fail and then you will fail.
And so this is why in this third stage
is finally a time where you really wanna own being CEO,
because this is where it matters the most.
In the prior stages is it's a distraction,
in this stage it is the thing that,
it'll make or break the company.
And so in this third stage,
you will actually wanna proudly
put CEO on the business card.
You will proudly wanna put it in your LinkedIn profile.
You can change it, you can say,
I was Founder for this many years and I was CEO for this.
You can change it all later once like,
you sell the company or exit or grow it or IPO or whatever.
But in that stage, it's super important for you.
This is really more for you to mentally know,
okay, I'm now the manager.
And part of this is, it is your duty as CEO
to make sure that you don't own any of the doing.
Given constraints around funding and runway and all of that
you still wanna figure out ways where,
how do I make sure there's a leader for the key functions
that's appropriate for the stage of the company we're in?
'Cause when you still hold onto a piece of it
and you don't hire a great leader to own it,
if you still do it as CEO,
it means it's not gonna get done very well, it's just not.
Not compared to you hiring a great VP of Marketing
or VP of Sales or VP of Product or whatever it may be.
So the first caveat in this third stage
when you finally put on the CEO hat is,
recognizing that your job is to be the leader,
not the best in the company in any of these disciplines.
So that's one of the things that I learned the hard way
and that I think like, it's really ego
that gets in the way that stops you from hiring the best
and you wanna put yourself in check on that.
Related to that,
the other thing that I learned
and this one sneaks up on even the greatest Founders.
The second thing, the caveat in this stage
is that there's always a sacred cow.
What I mean by that,
a sacred cow is this one thing that like,
you won't let anyone touch and you won't realize it.
And this is the realization that I only got much later,
like I think that we hired
a VP of Product way too late in the game,
we should have done it earlier.
And I always thought like, man,
why am I holding on a product?
And in my way, I had a little bit of an ego,
like I can create the best product.
And I thought that at the time,
and we still hired a VP of Product eventually.
Looking back, this is how much of a blind spot this becomes,
looking back, turns out my sacred cow was marketing.
I never hired a great VP of Marketing, like literally zero.
I hired two VPs of Sales,
I hired a VP of Engineering,
I had a VP of Product,
I had a VP of Ops,
all of it, never hired a VP of Marketing.
And only later looking back that I realized,
oh my God, that was my sacred cow.
All this time I thought it was engineering,
I'm an engineer first.
I thought it was product, but I hire,
I gave those away really quickly because it was so fixated,
like I'm not gonna let go of the sacred cow.
I'm not gonna let go of the sacred cow.
And I let go of those thinking
I was letting go of the sacred cow
when in reality it was a VP of Marketing.
I love marketing, I love go-to-market,
which like is obvious now,
but I never hired one.
And not that I don't believe I'm the best at go-to-market,
I think I have a lot of experience in it
that allows me to help Founders at this stage.
I don't believe that we couldn't have
recruited a great VP of Market,
it was my sacred cow.
Without realizing it I kept holding onto it
and did it hurt us?
Absolutely.
Not because I was bad at marketing,
not because I couldn't recruit someone,
but because it was a sacred cow and I didn't let go of it.
And I was doing that plus all these other things,
which was being CEO and that held us back
versus just getting someone that's better than me to own it.
And that's the biggest thing about this stage.
And this is why in stage one when you're,
when it's just you guys be the Founder.
In the stage two, be the Founder
and the Chief Happiness Officer.
In stage three own being CEO
and let go of the functions
and hire people better than you.
It sounds obvious,
but the reason I wanna do this video is
because in that you're gonna face your own demons.
You're gonna face your demons on,
oh, I'm not gonna be the smartest person
in doing this anymore.
Like, how do I feel about that?
You need to ask yourself that.
You're gonna face your own demons on
there are certain sacred cows where, you know,
you think that there's no one else in the world
that can do it better than you.
Guess what? There is.
And so that's why it requires your full attention.
And I think that if you are disciplined about being Founder
and then Founder and Chief Happiness Officer
or whatever you wanna call it,
and then you take on CEO,
you will recognize the difference
in what is called upon you to take your company
to the next level in a whole different way.
You will recognize that your job now
is to lead and recruit people better than you
to own these functions
and that is what your job is gonna be.
And that is what CEOs do, not any of the other stuff.
So this is why I wanted to do this video
because I think it's really near and dear to my heart
and I hope it's okay,
I did it in a slightly different format.
If you got value from this video,
if it's like speaking to you,
smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
I also drop an episode like this every single Sunday.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon,
that way you'll get notified
every single time I drop an episode.
And also I run a SaaS Go-to-Market Coaching Program.
I know that in each of these stages,
the journey of a Founder is very lonely
and you end up owning go-to market through all these stages,
even when you hire that great VP of Sales.
But you particularly own it
when you are that Founder in that middle stage,
maybe you raise the seed round
and now you have to really figure out
how to drive that revenue growth,
so you can raise that series A
or get to that next stage if you have Bootstrap
and then be able to afford those really great VPs
that are better than you.
So this is why I run my SaaS, Go-to-Market Coaching Program.
If you wanna learn more about it
and you wanna work with me
based on my 15 years of experience,
just go to tkkader.com/gtm.
And also, thanks for watching.
If you enjoyed this different format,
I wanna just switch it up,
you know, it's my channel, I guess I get to do it
and hopefully you like it.
I do this so that I can serve you guys
but I also do it because it,
you know, this is how I hone in on my craft.
And this is how I feed my soul
to share these lessons learned with you for free
so that you don't make the same mistakes that I did.
So if you got value, smash that like button,
put in the comments below, what's your sacred cow?
What stage are you in? Like I'd love to hear from you.
I respond to every single one of the comments.
And yeah, that's it.
Thank you for joining.
And I'll see you in the next episode
or inside the Go-To-Market Program.
Take care.