Founding Account Executive (First Sales Hire)

Founding Account Executive (First Sales Hire) — Answr NYC preferred (remote possible in a dense metro) · Full-time · Reports to the founder

What Answr does AI voice receptionist for small service businesses. We answer inbound calls, qualify the caller, book the job straight into the owner's calendar and text a confirmation. Core verticals are home services (HVAC, plumbing, electrical) and real estate teams. Pricing is $19 / $79 / $199 per month, so deals are small and the motion is high volume. The founder built the product himself. Delaware C-corp, based in NYC.

The role First sales hire, full cycle, reporting to the founder. They source their own pipeline, cold call, run demos, close and hand off. No SDRs underneath them, no marketing engine feeding them leads, no enablement team. Cycle should be days, not quarters: first call to signed in one or two conversations. This is an operator seat, not a strategist seat. The person who wins here is happy to dial 80 times a day and knock on doors in the Financial District, and would be bored writing a territory plan.

Comp

• $5,000 per month base ($60,000/year)
• Commission at 100% of the first month's MRR on every new account signed
• 1.25% equity, 4-year vest, 1-year cliff
• Quota is $2,800 of net new MRR per month (revenue, not logo count)
• At quota, roughly $33,600 of commission on top of base — year-one OTE around $93,000. The equity is the real upside and it is the reason the base sits where it does.

Must-haves

• Recent, quota-carrying, closing experience selling to SMBs, with actual numbers: deals closed in the last 12 months, average deal size, attainment against quota
• Has been through an early-stage startup ride as an early commercial hire — someone who has seen a company go from nothing to an outcome and knows what that ride costs
• Full-cycle ownership: they prospected, demoed and closed themselves, not just took handoffs
• Transactional, high-velocity motion. Low ACV, short cycle, lots of at-bats
• Genuinely comfortable cold calling and, ideally, in person
• 3 to 10 years of sales experience — enough reps to not need training, not so senior they only want to manage

Strong pluses

• Sold into home services, trades, contractors or real estate brokerages: ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, Weave, Podium, Birdeye, Broadly, Angi, Thumbtack, Yelp
• Reps out of high-volume SMB machines: Toast, Square, Justworks, Groupon, Indeed, ADP, Paychex
• Sold an AI or voice product, or at least sold something technical to non-technical owners
• NYC based, or in a dense metro where they can get in front of businesses in person
• Spanish speaker

Anti-profile — screen these out

• Enterprise reps with six-figure ACVs and six-month cycles
• Consultants and strategists who want to build a plan, hire a team and run a budget
• Anyone who needs inbound leads, an SDR, a CRM stack and marketing spend to function
• Anyone who wants this as a side project, or whose headline ask is a partnership rather than the job
• Anyone still running their own company (if a current founder, we need to know what happens to it)
• Unexplained gaps in the last two years, or a profile where the most senior roles carry no dates

Process Three stages: a 30-minute background and track record call with the founder, then a short sales plan walked through live, then a paid day actually selling Answr on demos.

Screening questions before submission

1. How many deals did you close in the last 12 months and what was the average size?
2. Walk me through one deal you sourced yourself from first touch to signature.
3. Which startup did you exit with, what was your role and how early were you?
4. Are you comfortable being the only sales person in the company for the first six months?

SEARCH NOTES (recruiter) Exit is a strong preference rather than a hard gate — "first/early commercial hire at a seed-stage startup" counts as satisfying the spirit. Timing: first profiles in ~2 weeks, signed this month.