How this 1st-time founder went from closing customers for $500 a month to $300,000 a year. | Sean McCarthy, Founder & CEO of BackOps

Sean was spending four days a week inside customer warehouses at Amazon Shipping when he noticed the same thing everywhere: back-office admin staff churning every six months, buried under the same repetitive claims and reshipping tasks. He talked to eighty-five warehouse owners, quit Amazon in July 2024, and cold emailed his way to a pre-seed round within weeks.

In this episode, Sean breaks down why he paused all sales to rebuild BackOps as an enterprise-grade platform, how an SOP recorder that takes eight minutes replaced months of deployment delays, and the scrappy enterprise playbook—from sending donuts to warehouses to building the customer's board deck for them—that wins $300K Fortune 500 deals.

Why You Should Listen

• Why talking to 85 customers before writing a line of code is worth more than anything.
• How an eight-minute screen recording replaced months of SOP-writing delays.
• Why "what are your problems?" fails in enterprise and a pointed use case wins eight out of ten times.
• How to structure pilots that auto-convert so you never end up in post-pilot purgatory.

Keywords startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, finding pmf, supply chain, AI automation, enterprise sales, BackOps, first-time founder, warehouse operations, logistics AI, Sean McCarthy, agentic AI

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:02:24 Beating a Giant on 5% Odds
• 00:09:25 Eighty-Five Warehouse Interviews
• 00:16:33 V1: A Slack Bot for Reshipping
• 00:22:05 Pausing Sales to Rebuild for Enterprise
• 00:34:49 The Scrappy Enterprise Sales Playbook
• 00:48:23 Two Intentional Wow Moments in Every Demo
• 00:53:40 The Moment of True Product Market Fit

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