Most founders believe sales is inevitable. You need a sales team. You need SDRs. You need a sales process. You need to close deals. Livestorm proved this isn't always true. They grew from a side project to 20 million in ARR with zero sales people. No SDRs, no AE managers, no VP of Sales. Just product and content. Here's how.
The Framework
Step 1: Make the product fast enough to demonstrate itself
The first thing Livestorm did was eliminate the friction between discovery and value. When you land on their page, you can create and host your first event in four minutes. Not complicated. Not “request a demo.” Four literal minutes to experience the core value.
This matters more than you think. Ninety percent of people who land on the page reach the first value point within two weeks. Once someone has used your product, the conversation changes. They're not evaluating you against competitors anymore. They're evaluating the competitors against what you've already proven works.
Step 2: Build a freemium model that converts, not just acquires
Livestorm offers a generous free plan. You can host one integrated event per month for free. That's enough to experience the core feature set. Enough to say yes or no. What it's not enough for is running your business on it, which is how freemium works. Free gets you in the door. Freemium gets you paying.
The difference matters. Free plans that are too basic don't convert because people never experience real value. Free plans that are too generous don't convert because people don't need to pay. Livestorm found the middle ground: just enough to understand, not enough to scale without paying.
Step 3: Leverage owned media and integration partnerships instead of outbound sales
Livestorm did a lot of co-marketing with integration partners like HubSpot and Zapier. Every HubSpot user who wanted to host an event inside their platform discovered Livestorm. Every Zapier user who wanted to connect their events to their workflow discovered Livestorm. You get discovered as part of someone else's ecosystem, not through cold email.
This strategy requires partners with complementary audiences. It requires building integrations first. It requires thinking about distribution before you think about conversion. Most founders skip this because it's harder than hiring a sales team.
Step 4: Feed organic channels consistently (especially communities)
Quora drove 10 to 15 percent of Livestorm's organic traffic for more than five years. Not because they hired someone to manage Quora full time. Because they answered questions in their community for years. Consistently. When someone asked how to host a webinar, Livestorm answered it. When someone asked about video conferencing, Livestorm answered it.
This only works if your product actually solves the problem better than alternatives. If you answer on Quora and people try your product and hate it, you're wasting time. Livestorm could afford to build organic channels because the product was good enough to convert people who discovered it.
Step 5: Build for self-serve from day one (don't add sales later as an afterthought)
This is the hardest part. Most founders build for inbound sales first (complex features, longer onboarding, more customization). Then they realize they need to reach people directly, so they hire a sales team. Then they're stuck with a product that requires hands-on selling.
Livestorm built for self-discovery first. Eighty-five percent of revenue on monthly self-serve plans. Because the product sells itself, they never needed to hire sales people. Once you go the sales route, it's almost impossible to go back.
When This Doesn't Work
This framework fails for high-touch, multi-stakeholder deals. If you're selling to enterprises where you need to get buy-in from IT, security, finance, and the end user, no amount of product speed will close the deal. You need sales.
This framework also fails if your product has a long onboarding curve. If it takes six months for someone to extract value, you can't build self-serve acquisition.
The Key Decision
Before you hire your first sales rep, ask this: Did we build this for self-serve first? If you hired a sales team because the product was too hard to use, you're not solving the product problem. You're covering it up.