The 3T story

Seven years selling a paid developer tool against free alternatives, from first sales hire to enterprise team lead. All 3T figures in USD.

I joined 3T Software Labs in 2018 as their first revenue-carrying enterprise seller. The company was at $250k ARR, selling Studio 3T, a paid IDE for MongoDB, to developers who defaulted, intensely, to free open-source tools. One of those free tools was ours: Robo 3T, which the company itself maintained. There was no sales engineer. There never was one in seven years.

About as hostile a starting position as B2B software sales gets, which is exactly why it taught me so much.

Becoming the sales engineer

Developers hate staying on the phone. To keep them there, I had to be worth talking to, so I worked through The Odin Project on my own time to learn enough development to hold my end of a technical conversation. I wrote my own demo scripts. Demo show-up rates went from 3 to 5% of calls to 20%, and at peak I was booking two or three demos a day.

What actually worked

The lessons that mattered weren't in any sales template:

• The experts weren't the buyers. We assumed MongoDB experts would love the tool most. One day of calls showed the opposite: the real market was developers who didn't know MongoDB and were afraid of breaking it. We rewrote the messaging for beginners and engagement jumped.
• DBAs, not VPs, are the hub of any dev tool land-and-expand. Typical accounts grew from $5k to 15k initial deals to $200k+ ARR over time.
• Timing beat persuasion. Reaching accounts before they committed to a free tool cut time-to-first-purchase from 6 to 9 months down to 2 to 3.
• One US bank went from "blocked by IT" to 3T's biggest single ARR client in 12 months: internal champions, a security review that meant branching our codebase, a restructured licensing model to fit their cost-center approvals, and a bottom-up education campaign.

I closed the deals that took 3T from $250k to $1M ARR myself.

Then the team

As Enterprise Sales Team Lead from 2021, I built and led a team of four to scale what had worked. The enterprise book grew to $8M+ ARR by 2023, about 60% of the company's $13M+ total. Renewal rate ran at 90% against a company average of 80%. I built a 30-day technical onboarding curriculum that brought non-technical hires to their first demo in a month; before it, ramp took two to three months and some senior hires never got there. It onboarded roughly ten reps over the years.

I stayed on the phone the whole time, personally handling the largest enterprise accounts while leading the team.

Why this matters for your startup

Everything I build for founders now is a distillation of this: the playbook, the CRM discipline, the onboarding curriculum, the hiring rubric. It was all learned on real deals in the hardest segment I know, selling paid software to technical people who already have a free alternative open in another tab.