Carolyn Betts

Who is Carolyn Betts?

Carolyn Betts is the founder and CEO of Betts, a go-to-market hiring platform built specifically for sales, marketing, and customer success roles. As she described it on the SaaStock USA 2024 stage, the platform works "kind of like a dating app but for talent" — matching companies with the revenue-side hires they need rather than treating recruiting as a generic, one-size-fits-all process. It is a focused bet on the idea that the people who close deals, run demand generation, and retain customers are a distinct category of hire, and that finding them deserves purpose-built tooling.

Betts has layered a network-incentive mechanism on top of the core platform in the form of what Carolyn calls Recruit Coin, which, in her words, "incentivises people to engage with our network." That design choice reflects a recurring theme in her thinking: great go-to-market talent is scarce, hard to reach, and best surfaced through warm, engaged networks rather than cold sourcing. By rewarding participation, Betts aims to keep its talent network active and referral-rich, which is exactly the kind of advantage that compounds in a recruiting business.

On stage, Carolyn speaks from the vantage point of someone who has watched hundreds of founders navigate the same inflection point: the moment when a company outgrows founder-led selling and has to build a real revenue team. Her SaaStock talk, "Building to Win: Steps and Secrets to Unlocking Your Rockstar Team," distills that experience into practical guidance for founders making their first and most consequential go-to-market hires. This page collects her recorded SaaStock talks with transcripts.

About Betts

Betts is a go-to-market hiring platform purpose-built for the revenue-generating functions of a software company: sales, marketing, and customer success. Rather than positioning itself as a general-purpose job board or staffing agency, Betts narrows its focus to the roles that most directly determine whether a SaaS company can scale beyond its founders — the account executives, demand-generation leaders, and customer success managers who carry a company from early traction into durable growth.

Carolyn frames the product as "kind of like a dating app but for talent," a metaphor that captures both the matching logic and the two-sided nature of the marketplace. On one side are companies that have reached product-market fit and need to professionalize their selling motion; on the other are go-to-market professionals looking for the right environment to do their best work. The Recruit Coin mechanism sits underneath this exchange, rewarding people who engage with the network and keeping the talent pool warm and participatory rather than dormant.

The company's worldview is shaped by a pattern Carolyn sees repeatedly among founders: an early-stage company is built on founder-led sales, with the founder personally bringing in every deal, until it reaches product-market fit and that approach stops scaling. Betts exists to serve that exact transition — helping founders identify, hire, and assemble the revenue teams that take selling off their own plate. The themes from her talk reflect that mission: building a rockstar team, recognizing when founder-led sales has run its course, and treating go-to-market hiring as a deliberate, repeatable discipline.

Key lessons from Carolyn Betts's talks

Founder-led sales is a phase, not a permanent strategy. Carolyn describes the familiar arc of a founder who builds an amazing company by going out and bringing in all the deals themselves — and then hits a point where that model can no longer carry the business. The lesson is to recognize founder-led sales as a stage that you intentionally graduate out of, rather than a habit you cling to past its usefulness.

Product-market fit is the signal to start building a real go-to-market team. In her telling, the critical inflection comes when a company reaches product-market fit. That milestone is not just a validation moment; it is the cue to begin hiring the sales, marketing, and customer success people who will let the company grow beyond what the founder can personally sell.

Go-to-market hiring deserves a specialized, deliberate approach. Betts exists because sales, marketing, and customer success roles are a distinct category of hire that benefit from purpose-built matching — "kind of like a dating app but for talent." The takeaway for founders is to treat revenue hiring as its own discipline rather than an afterthought bolted onto generic recruiting.

Warm, incentivized networks beat cold sourcing for scarce talent. The Recruit Coin model, designed to incentivise people to engage with the network, reflects a broader principle: the best go-to-market talent is found through active, engaged networks. Building and rewarding those connections is what makes assembling a rockstar team repeatable rather than lucky.