When should you hire your first AE?
The milestone is not a revenue number. It is a repeatable way to create, run, and learn from customer conversations.
“Hire when the motion can teach someone else.”
A first AE should inherit a system that already produces useful signals: who buys, why they care, what stalls the deal, and what an honest next step sounds like.
Before that point, the founder is still discovering the motion. Handing discovery away too early replaces learning with activity—and makes a weak process harder to see.
The founder’s job is to make the motion legible.
Your first seller cannot inherit instinct. They need to see how the company chooses accounts, earns a second meeting, handles uncertainty, and decides whether a deal is real. If those choices live only in the founder’s head, hiring adds activity before it adds capacity.
Write down the customer patterns that keep repeating. Which problems create urgency? Who joins the decision? What evidence moves the deal forward? A useful sales motion is not a script. It is a set of judgments another person can learn, test, and improve.
What should be true before the offer goes out?
You can describe the buyer without listing everyone. Recent wins share a recognizable problem. Discovery produces evidence, not just enthusiasm. Follow-up and CRM hygiene are teachable. And the founder has enough time to coach the first months closely.
If those conditions are missing, keep selling. The next ten conversations will teach you more than the next ten interviews.