Massive momentum is built from small wins

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Scaling Your First Sales Hire in 6 Weeks

When seed‑stage SaaS startup UpSmith couldn’t fill their first sales role after five months, they flipped the script with a fractional recruiter.

By embedding an on‑demand expert who ran outbound sourcing, screens, and interviews end‑to‑end, they closed their hire in just six weeks—4× faster than before. 

If you’re juggling product roadmaps and user feedback, a “rent‑a‑recruiter” can own your search without blowing your burn rate.

Learn how a startup-friendly, hourly recruiting model works → 

🔗 Jake’s Picks

Must-Read Resources for Founders

🚀 Scaling Startups

• How to scale your startup with AI (Sifted)

🧠 Founder Self-Development & Mental Health

• 8 self-development activities every founder should make time for (Inc)

📈 Productivity Hacks

• Body doubling - the productivity hack you didn’t know you needed (Forbes)

🛠 Tools for Scaling

• 8 best scheduling apps for small business (Calendly)

💡 Hiring Insights

• Still hiring the nice candidate? How to reduce bias in hiring (HR Executive)

👀 ICYMI

• One of the hardest things to do as a founder (Scale Smarter Newsletter)

🏗️ Engineering team momentum

It’s the most intangible and it decides every startup’s fate.

Momentum.

When you have it, everything feels smoother - meetings are sharper, problems get solved faster, and the team is more engaged.

When you don’t, even small tasks feel like dragging a boulder uphill.

To a degree, you can control this.  As a leader, there’s ways you can go about engineering momentum on purpose instead of waiting for it to magically appear.

Quick wins > Big promises

Set your team up to win weekly, not just quarterly. Break larger projects into 1-2 week sprints with clearly defined “visible progress” markers. If a feature takes 4 weeks, define what can be demoed in week 1, even if it’s just a skeleton.

Make shipping something the expectation.

This is how the early days at Dropbox went, especially when it came to gathering user and customer feedback.  The idea of shipping mvp-like features allowed Dropbox’s team to iterate within their sprints, adjusting product development a lot quicker.

Make progress public

Create a weekly “Wins Roundup” on Slack every Friday. Ask every team lead to share 1–2 wins from their group. Keep it short, celebratory, and cross-functional.

It shifts team culture from “what’s broken?” to “what’s working?”and helps newer team members feel like they’re part of forward motion.

Speed becomes a culture

Use “momentum meetings” instead of traditional status updates. These should focus only on:

• What moved forward?

• What got blocked and how do we unblock it now?

• Who did something that helped us gain speed this week?

Momentum doesn’t just have to be an outcome, it can also be something you make room for every week.

💪 Building founder confidence through momentum

As your company grows, so do the demands on you as a leader. But the biggest shifts don’t always come from major breakthroughs - they come from stacking small, consistent wins that build trust in yourself.

Momentum isn’t just for the product roadmap or team morale either.  It’s a mental framework that can be used intentionally. This framework becomes one of the most effective tools for scaling your confidence, sharpening your instincts, and evolving how you lead.

Transform confidence into a system

Treat founder confidence like a muscle, not a mood. Start keeping a private “Momentum Log” in Notion or Apple Notes answering the 3 things you moved forward each week, however small. It’s a running proof-of-work log that builds identity as a capable, resilient leader.

When it feels like momentum slows down, you’ll have something to look at that will remind you of how much work you’ve done to get to the point you’re at.

Momentum counters impostor syndrome

Next time you catch yourself second-guessing your decision-making, interrupt the loop by asking: “What’s one small, valuable move I can make right now?”

Send the email.

Make the intro.

Book the coffee.

Stack enough of those moves and that voice in your head will shrink dramatically.  It’s a lot easier to feel like you’re progressing forward when you get through even the simplest tasks.

Track your own wins seriously

Try setting personal OKRs, not just for the company, but for your own growth as a leader.

One week it might be “run a tighter exec meeting,” another it might be “delegate the thing I’ve been hoarding.” Review your own progress monthly. If you wouldn’t scale a team without metrics, don’t scale yourself without them either.

Momentum isn’t just a tool for progress, it’s a signal to others.

Investors, employees, and partners all bet on forward motion. When your company feels like it’s always moving, even if it’s inch by inch, t becomes magnetic.

In reality, momentum is rarely about speed. It’s about rhythm. Build that rhythm, and growth stops being an uphill battle, it becomes a natural reflex.

Founder Toolkit: When to Fractionalize Your Recruiting

Is it time to dial in on-demand talent acquisition?

• Less than 3 hires/mo? A full‑time recruiter often under‑utilizes budget.

• Specialized or executive roles? Save 70–90% vs. agency commissions by tapping fractional experts.

• Hiring sprints. Need to catch up? Scale up recruiting hours for a blitz and pause when you’re back on track.

Your team runs lean—your recruiting should, too. Discover the “rent‑a‑recruiter” approach that flexes with your growth: Get started here → 

🎬 TLDR — Your Actions For The Week:

• Scale Your Team → Build a habit of publicly sharing wins to not only inspire but to also make team members feel included in the bigger mission

• Scale Yourself → Log your wins to refer back to when it feels like things aren’t moving the way you want them to

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help:

💼 Hiring? I built an expert bench of recruiters from companies like Uber, Amazon & Spotify to run the full recruiting process for you. We’re on-demand, can flex up & down, and there are zero commissions or hidden fees—Learn more here.