Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Hackathon, a standalone startup spun out of Brightidea, is hiring its founding go-to-market employee to sell its hackathon and innovation-event product. The role owns full-cycle sales while prototyping solutions to product gaps and building Hackathon’s sales playbook, processes, and tooling.
Responsibilities
- Own full-cycle sales for Hackathon. Source, qualify, run discovery and demos, negotiate, and close new business for the Hackathon product — no handoffs required
- Prospect relentlessly. Build and execute your own outbound motion (email, LinkedIn, calling) to fill your own Hackathon pipeline, alongside any inbound/marketing-sourced leads and any warm intros from Brightidea's existing customer base
- Find the gaps. In discovery and demo calls, identify where the Hackathon product doesn't fully meet a prospect's event, workflow, or requirement
- Build the bridge. Use AI coding tools to rapidly prototype a solution — a script, a lightweight integration, a custom automation, a mockup of the missing feature — that lets the prospect see (and often use) the fix before the deal stalls
- Know when to say no. Just as important as building: quickly and technically assess when something *can't* be reasonably solved for, so you don't overpromise or waste the prospect's time
- Feed the product loop. Turn what you learn and build in the field into structured input for Hackathon's product and engineering effort — you're often the first person to prove a feature's value before it's ever formally scoped
- Forecast accurately and manage a pipeline with discipline in the CRM
- Help define the ICP and messaging. Sharpen who Hackathon sells to and why, based on real signal from the deals you're running — not a static persona doc inherited from the parent business
- Stand up the playbook. Document what's working in discovery, demo, and closing so it can be codified into a repeatable process for future Hackathon AEs
- Shape the tech stack. Weigh in on and help implement the CRM, sales engagement, and AI tooling Hackathon's go-to-market motion will run on as it scales
- Partner cross-functionally. Work directly with Hackathon's product and marketing functions — and with Brightidea's broader Marketing, Product, and Customer Success teams where useful — to close feedback loops on positioning, packaging, and pricing while the motion is still being formed
- Pressure-test pricing and packaging. Bring real objections and win/loss patterns back to leadership to inform how Hackathon packages and prices the product going forward
- Help recruit the team you'll eventually work alongside. As Hackathon's founding AE, you may help source, screen, or reference-check future sales hires as the go-to-market team grows
Skills
- 5+ years of full-cycle B2B SaaS sales experience, with a track record of self-sourced pipeline and closed-won revenue
- Prior experience as an early or founding sales hire, or strong interest in building process from scratch rather than executing an existing playbook
- Genuine hands-on comfort with modern AI coding tools (e.g., Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT)
- Enough technical fluency to reason about feasibility: what's a quick script, what's an API integration, what's a real engineering lift
- Strong outbound instincts — you don't wait for leads, you build them
- Comfortable in front of technical and executive buyers alike; able to translate business pain into both a sales narrative and a technical prototype
- Curious, low-ego, and energized by ambiguity — this role doesn't have a well-worn playbook yet, and Hackathon doesn't yet have one either
- Comfortable being the sole (initial) go-to-market hire on a single-product startup team, rather than one of many AEs on an established product
- Experience selling into innovation, HR, people ops, event, or L&D personas — the buyers most likely to run a hackathon or innovation event
- Prior experience at an early-stage or lean-team SaaS startup where AEs wear multiple hats
- Experience selling event, community, or engagement-platform products
- A portfolio, GitHub, or demo of something you've vibe-coded
- Experience helping build or formalize a sales process, playbook, or tooling stack from the ground up, ideally at a company spun out of or backed by a larger parent
Company Overview