No fixed salary. Pay a higher commission when revenue comes in. Keep cash available for building the business. I get the appeal. But consider what you are asking the sales hire to take responsibility for. A sale depends on more than persuasive sales skills.
In an early B2B SaaS or AI company, the target customer may still be unclear. Positioning, use cases, value proposition and pricing may still be changing. There may be little evidence that anyone beyond the founder can sell the product consistently.
Even if you have sold your product a dozen times and generated substantial revenue, that does not necessarily prove product-market-fit if the buyer persona and deal conditions change every single time. It shows potential. It does not mean you have found a scalable business opportunity. If the hire has to resolve those questions, you are asking them to develop your go-to-market system while paying them only for closed deals.
Even once that system exists, revenue still depends on work outside the reps control: product quality, delivery, marketing support and founder decisions about pricing and resources. A higher commission increases the reward for a sale. It does nothing to fix the conditions that prevent one. The rep spends time building pipeline and testing assumptions, with no income if the business cannot convert that work into revenue. Meanwhile, the business benefits from what they learn.
That is a substantial transfer of risk. The commission rate alone tells you little about whether the expected income justifies it. Commission-only can be reasonable where the offer is proven, the rep has meaningful control over selling and the economics justify the risk. An independent agent with an established buyer network is a different proposition from your first full-time sales hire.
For a startup still finding its market, I would pay a base that reflects the strategic work involved in building and validating the sales process, then use commission to reward results. Especially in the early GTM phase, you want your sales team to pay more attention to who they sell to, how they do it and how they can improve than to simply increasing sales volume. Otherwise, you risk closing deals the product or delivery team cannot support.
Early GTM is less about volume than creating the conditions that let you scale later on. Before asking a rep to bet their income on your business, show them what makes that bet commercially credible.