Founding GTM Hacker

Founding GTM Hacker at Afore Capital

Description

• Share this job Title: Founding GTM Hacker Location: San Francisco, CA Reporting Structure: This role will work closely with the Afore Capital investment team and directly with Afore portfolio founders. Company Description Afore Capital is a leading pre-seed venture capital firm that partners with founders at the earliest stages of company-building — often before a product is fully built, before revenue, and sometimes when the company is still just an idea. Afore has helped define the pre-seed category and has backed hundreds of ambitious founders building category-defining companies. The firm is deeply hands-on with its portfolio, helping founders navigate the earliest and hardest parts of building a company: finding customers, validating markets, hiring early teams, sharpening positioning, and getting from zero to one. Afore is now looking for a Founding GTM Hacker to help portfolio companies build early go-to-market motion from the ground up. This is a unique role for someone who loves early-stage startups, knows how to grind, and can help founders turn ideas into real customer conversations.

• Quick facts

• Work directly with pre-seed and seed-stage founders across the Afore portfolio

• Help startups source, engage, and book meetings with potential customers, design partners, and early buyers

• Own a mix of hands-on outbound execution and strategic GTM advising

• Build repeatable systems, playbooks, and workflows that can scale across the portfolio

• Ideal for someone with

• strong BDR/SDR, early sales, founder-led sales, or growth hacking experience

• Opportunity to build a new GTM support function inside a top pre-seed VC firm

Responsibilities

• Source and book high-quality sales meetings for Afore portfolio companies

• Build outbound lists, identify net-new leads, and create targeted prospecting strategies

• Write compelling cold outbound messaging for companies that may not yet have brand recognition, mature proof points, or case studies

• Help founders identify ICPs, buyer personas, use cases, pain points, and early market segments

• Advise founders on early GTM strategy, including positioning, messaging, sales process, and customer discovery

• Support founders in selling idea-stage, pre-product, or early-product offerings to prospective customers

• Build repeatable outbound playbooks, email templates, lead sourcing workflows, and GTM experiments

• Leverage software, AI tools, data, and portfolio insights to source leads more intelligently

• Track learnings from outbound campaigns and prospect conversations to help founders refine their market approach

• Partner closely with the Afore investment team to prioritize portfolio company support

• Identify patterns across portfolio companies and turn those insights into scalable resources, systems, and best practices

• Is this you?

• You have the grit, urgency, and discipline of a great BDR or SDR

• You are willing to grind and source net-new leads from scratch

• You can write strong outbound that gets people to respond

• You are energized by early-stage startups, especially pre-seed and seed-stage companies

• You are comfortable selling something that is still ambiguous, early, or idea-stage

• You do not need polished proof points, mature case studies, or a big brand name to generate interest

• You can think strategically about GTM, not just brute-force your way through outbound

• You are excited by the idea of working across many different companies, markets, and founder personalities

• You are scrappy, resourceful, and highly ownership-oriented

• You like building systems and playbooks, not just executing one-off tasks

• You are intellectually curious and excited to learn how great companies go from zero to one

• You can quickly understand a founder’s vision and translate it into compelling customer-facing messaging

• Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in outbound sales, BDR, SDR, early GTM, founder-led sales, growth, or revenue roles

• Proven ability to source net-new leads and book qualified meetings

• Experience working at or with pre-seed, seed, or Series A startups

• Strong written communication skills, especially for cold outreach

• Experience with sales tools, sequencing tools, CRMs, data enrichment platforms, AI tools, or GTM automation

• Ability to understand technical, AI, infrastructure, developer tools, vertical SaaS, or B2B software products

• Experience helping founders, executives, or early sales teams with customer discovery or pipeline generation

• Comfort working in ambiguous, fast-moving, zero-to-one environments

• Prior exposure to venture capital, portfolio operations, startups, or founder communities is a plus

• Perks

• Work with ambitious founders at the earliest stages of company creation

• Get exposure to dozens of startups, markets, business models, and GTM motions

• Sit at the center of a high-quality venture ecosystem

• Help define what world-class GTM support looks like for pre-seed companies

• Build a new function inside Afore with real ownership and visibility

• Learn directly from founders, investors, and early GTM operators

• Play a direct role in helping startups land their first customers, validate markets, and build early revenue momentum

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