Following the collapse of Builder.ai, one of the most commonly mentioned quotes by its founder is where he said about wanting to make building an app as easy as ordering pizza.
Could it really become that? Possibly so, for there is no dearth of “make your own pizza” options around the corner of any London high street. Or a lack of imagination among pizza aficionados when thinking of pizza toppings.
You can’t fault a startup founder for building a vision. Outrageous as it may be. On the contrary, the more the better. There are numerous examples throughout startup history. We thrive on, enable and reward a “fake it till you make it” culture.
The product is being pulled apart for being more human than AI, as was being claimed. The approach in itself isn’t wrong to begin with – how else does a startup validate, build and refine its value proposition? But a line needs to be drawn where the MVP needs to become the product it set out to become. A few hundred million in investor money later, and you can’t still be cranking up the machine by adding more horses to pull the cart. It needs to transform into the swanky car that was promised.
The Recurring Nightmare: Five Ways Sales Culture Destroys Startups
Builder.ai’s implosion isn’t some freak accident. It’s a pattern repeated across the startup landscape, driven by the same systemic failures that infect companies like a virus.
Leadership Skills
Founders, many of whom come from purely technical backgrounds, often lack the understanding of building a sales org. Sales ends up becoming a black box which should magically conjure sustainable revenue. Unrealistic revenue targets become the norm. The processes aren’t supportive, and feedback to and communication with various teams like product and customer success doesn’t happen.
Misaligned Incentives
Sales teams get bonuses for closing deals, not creating customers who’ll stick around. This creates a perverse dynamic where success is measured by signatures rather than value delivered. The rep who overpromises gets promoted while the one who sets realistic expectations gets questioned about their “hunger.”
Investor Pressure
Venture capital has turned exponential growth from nice-to-have into must-have-or-die. The pressure becomes so intense that sustainable practices get sacrificed on the altar of hockey stick projections.
Product Hype
Startups market products as revolutionary breakthroughs without sufficient proof they actually work. The gap between marketing copy and product reality becomes so wide, an elephant could walk through. Everyone becomes complicit in maintaining the illusion because admitting the truth feels like defeat.
Toxic Culture
A culture that prioritises revenue above all else inevitably becomes one that justifies cutting corners, bending truths, and burning people out. What gets called “high performance” is often just dysfunction operating at scale.
The Question That Matters
Any company’s sales organisation is the most visible manifestation of what a company actually believes about itself. When sales culture is grounded in reality and focused on genuine customer value, it becomes a force for sustainable growth. But when it becomes corrupted by hype and misaligned incentives, it metastasises and kills everything else.
The question every founder, investor, and operator should be asking isn’t “How fast can we scale?”
Instead, it should be: “Are we selling something that actually exists, delivers real value, and can be delivered as promised?”
You can promise the world’s greatest pizza, but if what you deliver is cardboard with ketchup, no amount of wizardry will save you.
The Builder.ai story isn’t just about one company’s failure. It’s about an entire ecosystem that has lost sight of the difference between ambition and delusion, between growth and sustainability. Until we acknowledge that difference, we’ll keep creating conditions for the next Builder.ai to rise and fall in exactly the same way.
In the summer of 2021, two B2B SaaS startups launched within weeks of each other. The world had started emerging from the global pandemic, but its effects were still reshaping how we work. Remote work had become the new default, and companies were scrambling to adapt to this fundamental shift.
Sensing opportunity, countless startups began building solutions for remote workforce management and employee well-being. Among them were RemoteAB* and TeamXY*—both founded by driven teams of consultants and technologists who saw the same market gap and had similar visions for filling it.
The timing seemed perfect. The economy was rebounding, funding was flowing, and both teams easily secured seed rounds. They built solid MVPs that gained early traction and hired their first sales reps within three months of launch.
By the end of Year 2, one had hit $4M ARR and closed a Series A.
The other folded quietly after burning through its seed capital.
This is the story of how two seemingly identical startups took radically different paths—and what every B2B founder and sales leader can learn from their journeys.
1. Strategic Focus vs. The “Everyone is Our Customer” Trap
RemoteAB’s Approach: Cast the widest possible net. Software, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services—if they had remote workers, they were a prospect. Size didn’t matter. Geography didn’t matter. Industry vertical didn’t matter. The philosophy was simple: more leads equal more revenue.
TeamXY’s Approach: Ruthless focus. They targeted software and IT services companies with 100-200 employees and operations across exactly three countries. This wasn’t arbitrary—it was the sweet spot where their solution delivered maximum value and where buyers had both the pain and purchasing power to act quickly.
The Results:
RemoteAB generated 3x more demos but struggled with conversions. When deals did close, customer fit was poor and churn was brutal.
TeamXY had fewer leads but achieved a 40% higher close rate and 60% lower churn in their first year.
The Strategic Principle:
This reflects Michael Porter’s concept of strategic positioning—the idea that competitive advantage comes from choosing to perform different activities than rivals, or performing similar activities in different ways. TeamXY chose differentiation through focus on a narrow niche, while RemoteAB fell into the trap of trying to be everything to everyone.
Lesson: A tighter ICP doesn’t shrink your addressable market—it sharpens your go-to-market motion and amplifies your value proposition.
2. Building Systems vs. Being the System
Both founders were natural salespeople who could close deals through sheer force of personality and market knowledge. But they approached scaling in fundamentally different ways.
RemoteAB’s Founder: Became addicted to the rush of closing deals personally. Every important prospect call included the founder. When the first sales reps were hired, he continued leading most conversations, believing his presence gave prospects confidence in the company.
This approach worked initially—deals closed faster when he was involved. But it created an unsustainable bottleneck and prevented the development of repeatable processes that others could execute.
TeamXY’s Founder: Used early sales conversations as a laboratory for building institutional knowledge. Rather than dominating every call, they meticulously documented each interaction, analysing what messaging resonated, which objections surfaced, and how successful deals progressed.
Over six months, this research became a comprehensive sales playbook that enabled consistent rep onboarding and performance.
The Results:
RemoteAB’s revenue plateaued at $500K ARR as the founder became the constraint.
TeamXY scaled from founder-led sales to a five-rep team generating $300K monthly.
The Strategic Principle:
This reflects Henry Mintzberg’s research on effective managerial roles—specifically the tension between operational involvement and strategic system-building. TeamXY’s founder understood that scaling requires transitioning from performing operational tasks to designing the organisational capabilities that enable others to perform those tasks effectively.
Lesson: Your early sales success should generate processes, not dependencies. Build a machine that works without you.
3. Intelligence-Driven Optimisation vs. Activity Theatre
RemoteAB: Operated on volume assumptions. More emails, more calls, more LinkedIn connections would inevitably lead to more revenue. Success was measured in activity metrics, not outcome insights.
TeamXY: Approached sales as a hypothesis-testing exercise. They tracked granular data: which personas responded to specific messaging, which objections consistently stalled deals, which CTAs drove engagement. Weekly reviews focused on pattern recognition and continuous optimisation.
The Results:
RemoteAB exhausted themselves and their prospects with spray-and-pray tactics that generated noise, not signal.
TeamXY achieved compound improvements by turning small insights into systematic advantages.
The Strategic Principle:
This reflects the lean startup methodology’s Build-Measure-Learn cycle, applied to sales operations. TeamXY treated their sales process as a product that required continuous iteration based on data-driven feedback.
Lesson: You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and you can’t scale what doesn’t work consistently.
4. Customer Success as Revenue Insurance vs. “Set It and Forget It”
RemoteAB: Treated the signed contract as the finish line. New customers received login credentials, a PDF user guide, and reactive support when they reached out. No structured onboarding, no success milestones, no proactive engagement. Within 60 days, 40% of customers had churned or gone completely silent.
TeamXY: Recognised that the sale was actually the beginning of the revenue relationship. Every new customer received a customised 30-60-90 day success plan. Customer Success Managers joined hand-off calls. Usage patterns were monitored proactively, and outreach was triggered by both positive and negative behavioural signals.
The Results:
– RemoteAB haemorrhaged customers before they could realise value, creating a leaky bucket that no amount of new sales could fill.
– TeamXY achieved 90%+ activation within 30 days and expanded 25% of accounts within six months.
The Strategic Principle:
This aligns with the concept of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) optimisation. TeamXY understood that retention and expansion revenue from existing customers is significantly more profitable than acquiring new ones—typically 5-25x more cost-effective according to research by Bain & Company.
Lesson: Revenue doesn’t end at signature—it begins there. Design your onboarding as carefully as your sales process.
5. Building Winning Culture vs. Grinding Through Dysfunction
By Year 2, the cultural differences between the teams were stark.
RemoteAB: Sales reps were burned out and demoralised. Without a clear ICP, they chased unqualified leads. Without proven processes, they couldn’t replicate the founder’s success. Without proper onboarding support, their deals often fell apart post-signature. Compensation plans were confusing, career progression was unclear, and morale was toxic.
TeamXY: Cultivated a tight, collaborative culture. Reps shared insights from their calls, celebrated both individual wins and team milestones, and had clear guidelines for success. The sales organisation felt like a learning laboratory rather than a pressure cooker.
The Results:
RemoteAB experienced 80% sales team turnover, creating constant disruption and knowledge loss.
TeamXY promoted two SDRs into AE roles and maintained zero attrition while consistently hitting team targets.
The Strategic Principle:
This reflects Daniel Pink’s research in “Drive” about intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose drive performance more effectively than external pressures alone. TeamXY created an environment where reps could develop mastery within clear boundaries and see how their work contributed to customer success.
Lesson: The sales culture you build early becomes your competitive moat. Invest in it deliberately.
The Strategic Framework: Your Two Playbooks
Sales success in B2B startups isn’t about luck, charisma, or market timing—it’s the result of intentional, strategic decisions compounding over time.
The TeamXY Playbook (Do These):
1. Define and defend a tight ICP early—specificity creates clarity and competitive advantage
3. Track outcomes and patterns, not just activities—intelligence beats intensity
4. Design proactive customer success as revenue insurance—retention amplifies acquisition
5. Cultivate a culture of learning and growth—great reps attract great reps
The RemoteAB Playbook (Avoid These):
1. Chasing every lead—bad-fit customers kill momentum and morale
2. Founder dependency beyond seed stage—you become the bottleneck
3. Measuring motion instead of progress—activity without insight is waste
4. Treating signature as finish line—revenue starts with successful onboarding
5. Neglecting team culture—dysfunction compounds faster than growth
What This Means for You
If you’re building or scaling a B2B sales organisation, the path forward is clear. The difference between RemoteAB and TeamXY wasn’t talent, timing, or luck—it was strategic discipline applied consistently over time.
The question isn’t whether you’ll face these decisions—you will. The question is whether you’ll recognise them as strategic inflection points and choose the path that builds sustainable competitive advantage.
Further Reading
To deepen your understanding of the strategic principles underlying successful B2B sales organisations:
