You've got product-market fit in the UK. The board's started asking about America. And somewhere in a deck there's a line about "North American expansion" with a date attached to it.
So what's the actual first move?
Most Founders reach for the obvious stuff: An Office, a US Entity, a Lawyer, a logo on a door in New York or Austin.
The ones who get it right tend to start somewhere far less glamorous.
They start with a single sales hire, and they take that decision more seriously than almost anything else on the expansion plan.
Here's why that hire carries so much weight, and how to get it right.
Let's Dive In!
The US isn't just a bigger version of the UK
It's tempting to treat America as the same motion with more zeros on the end. It isn't.
The buyers behave differently. Deal cycles can be faster and more aggressive, expectations of a Rep are higher, and the competition for attention is fierce.
A prospect in San Francisco has probably seen four tools like yours this quarter. Your UK talk track, the one that lands so well in London and Manchester, can fall flat when the reference points, the pace and the buying committee all shift.
So the first person you put in front of American buyers isn't just carrying quota. They're carrying your read on the entire market. Get that person right and you learn what actually works in the US. Get them wrong and you spend a year mistaking a hiring mistake for a market problem.
Hire the Person, not the Postcode
The instinct to sign an office lease first is understandable. It feels like progress. But an office doesn't sell anything, and it locks you into a city before you know where your customers really are.
Your first US hire is a market-entry decision dressed up as a job spec. Whoever takes it needs to do three things at once: Close early deals themselves, tell you the truth about what's landing and what isn't, and lay the foundations for the team that comes after them. That's a player-coach, not a pure individual contributor and not a hands-off leader who wants a team to inherit on day one.
The Founders who move too slowly here usually do so because they're waiting for the "full" hire, the seasoned VP with a perfect logo history. Sometimes that's right. Often, at the first-hire stage, it's overkill, and it's expensive.
What Good actually looks like
The strongest first US hires we place tend to share a few things.
They've carried a bag in the US, not just managed people who did.
They know the patch you're targeting, whether that's mid-market SaaS on the East Coast or enterprise security on the West.
They're realistic about ramp, because they've lived it.
And they walk in with a clear-eyed view of Comp: US on-target earnings usually sit well above UK equivalents, the base-to-variable split is different, and pretending otherwise just means losing your top candidate at offer stage.
One example that sticks with me. A Series B UK FinTech we worked with was ready to plant a flag in the US and instinctively wanted to relocate one of their best London Reps to run it. On paper it made sense. In practice, that Rep had never sold into American buyers, didn't know the ecosystem, and would have been learning the market and building a team at the same time. Instead they hired a VP Sales in New York who'd scaled a US revenue team from scratch before. She closed the first handful of logos herself, fed back hard truths about pricing and positioning within weeks, and hired the two AEs who became the core of the team. The London Rep, freed up, went on to smash their own number at home.
A different one: A London-based Developer-Tools company held off on the office entirely and hired a single senior AE, remote, in the right time zone. That one hire generated enough US pipeline in two quarters to justify the entity, the office and the next three roles, in that order. The hire came first, and everything else followed the evidence.
The Mistakes we see UK Founders make
A few patterns come up again and again.
Sending a UK top performer to "go build it." Being brilliant in one market doesn't automatically transfer to another. Sometimes it works. Often you've just taken your best UK Rep off your best UK patch and set them up to struggle.
Underpaying against the US market. Benchmarking American comp against your UK bands is the fastest way to lose the person you actually want. The good ones have options.
Hiring the wrong shape. A closer when you needed a builder, or a big-team leader when you needed someone who'll still pick up the phone. Be honest about which stage you're at.
Waiting too long. Every quarter you delay the first hire is a quarter your competitors are talking to your future customers.
Start with the Hire, let the rest follow
The office can wait. The entity can wait. The launch party can definitely wait.
The one thing that shouldn't wait is the person who's going to tell you whether America wants what you've built, and then go and prove it. Get that hire right and the rest of the expansion plan writes itself off the back of real evidence rather than a slide.
If you're a UK SaaS business eyeing the US and weighing up that first hire, it's exactly the kind of brief we spend our days on. It's worth a conversation before you commit to a postcode.
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