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

Send me a message to let me know what you think!

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

A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders