In-house, before 30Plays. As Head of Sales and later Chief Revenue Officer, I built CircuitHub's first commercial function, from pre-revenue to approximately $20m in annualised revenue.
CircuitHub is an electronics manufacturing and software business focused on printed circuit board assembly, operating between London and Western Massachusetts, near Boston. It is a Y Combinator company.
I joined in November 2017 as Head of Sales and later became Chief Revenue Officer. The business had around eight or nine people, no revenue yet, and early interest from startup customers. I was the first dedicated commercial hire, with a mandate to build the commercial engine from the ground up.
The product was technical and so was the buyer: usually an engineer designing or iterating an electronic product, who needed assembled boards made quickly, reliably and at growing scale. Larger customers needed to trust the product before they placed larger orders.
I set up a structured commercial motion: choosing target companies, finding the right people inside them, building email cadences, running LinkedIn outreach and booking demos. Early traction became a process that could be measured and improved.
I put CircuitHub's technical people directly in front of customers. Engineering buyers got credible answers from credible people, which built confidence and made larger commitments easier to say yes to.
With the product team, I helped make more of the process self-serve, using automation and machine-learning-led decisions to cut manual steps between a quote and an order.
The model became land and expand: start with one engineer or team on a prototype order, prove the value, then grow into other teams and larger production runs inside the same company.
I introduced OKRs, company values and 360 reviews across a globally distributed team, so the operating rhythm grew with the headcount rather than after it.
Over my time there, CircuitHub went from pre-revenue to approximately $20m in annualised revenue, and from around eight or nine people to roughly 70 to 80.
Customers typically started with prototype orders and, once trust was built, moved on to larger projects and full production runs. Formlabs, the 3D printing company, is the clearest example: the relationship ran from prototyping through to scaled production, including the China supply chain.
Accounts won during my tenure included Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, NASA, SpaceX, Tesla, Toyota and Ford.
What it shows: a complex technical sale scales on trust and engineering credibility, not on sales volume. The motion that worked was the one that let an engineer try it small and then bring their colleagues.