Hey 👋 I’m Nate! Every week I write about the strategies for building a sales & growth engine at an early-stage company. My goal is to provide leaders with actionable insights rooted in examples so that you can apply them to your own company. Please send me questions on the topic and I’ll do my best to provide direct advice and/or cover in an upcoming newsletter.
A little bit about me…
My name is Nate Mihalovich. I’ve been working in tech for over 15 years with a core focus on building sales teams from scratch. I started my own company called The Lasso in 2020, which was a marketplace for people to auction their cars directly to car dealerships. We were acquired by Octane at the end of 2024 and I’m now the SVP of Sales & Partnerships for their new vertical of automotive.
Prior to that, I was the first non-engineering hire (6th employee) at BuildingConnected where I helped take multiple products from 0 to $1M in ARR and the overall team to $20M ARR in 4 years. We were acquired by Autodesk in 2019 for $275M.
I’ve also advised and invested in over 20 companies - mainly early stage. The vast majority of those companies have similar questions, issues, and needs around sales & growth. I’ve started The Sales Engine to build a place and community where we can tackle all those challenges together.
Who is this newsletter for?
My hope is that this is for everyone because sales is so fundamental to a growing business. Every business needs customers, and this newsletter aims to help with the tactics around growing & retaining them.
The people who will likely find the most value most quickly here are software sales leaders and individual contributors (at any level). Startup founders and executives will also find value on the management components especially as they’re putting making their first sales hires.
Why now?
The Sales Engine is a playbook for building sales motions from scratch. The number of resources available to sales teams that are rooted in modern, concrete examples are limited. It’s time that there’s a collection of strategies available for everyone operating in or near a sales organization - whether at an individual contributor, manager, or exec level. And the best part is that we can build a discussion and community about these topics together on Substack.
