Startups typically use a top-down sales motion to sell expensive products to executives at large companies and a Bottoms Up motion to acquire individual users, which can lead to sales to those executives.

Startups that sell using a Top Down approach often see better early retention metrics compared to those using Bottom Up sales.

Selling to startups can be a powerful strategy, as demonstrated by Gusto, which started with startups and successfully expanded into the broader SMB market.

Bottom Up sales start with the user, focusing on building a self-serve product that can be adopted without direct interaction with the company. This approach works well for startups that solve pain points for individuals or small teams, as products need to be easy to adopt and can spread virally within an organization.

A perfect example of Bottoms Up sales is Slack, which small teams could adopt independently, allowing it to spread virally within organizations before the sales team reached out.

Most developer tools are sold bottom-up; sales teams should identify if employees within enterprises are already using the product and help management understand its value.

Many successful Y Combinator companies, like Stripe and PagerDuty, started by selling to other startups, demonstrating that this can be a successful strategy.

The key to AWS's success was the conviction that it would tap into an infinitely large and growing market for cloud computing, driven by exponential demand for computing power.

Startups are now able to sell into enterprises faster than ever, achieving significant revenue milestones more quickly than in previous years.