It seems to me you're confusing technical sales and marketing, as your post describes more of a tech sales role. If this is tech sales / business dev guy you're looking for, it's pretty straightforward: trial and error. Hire a few people, see how they perform, keep the one(s) that bring in the best sales (doesn't always means most btw, quality of relationship affects lifetime customer value a lot).<p>Now, if you're talking marketing, and if this is your first marketing person to join, I'd recommend you look at people who can do good market analysis, sales strategy and support, and also product strategy. These people don't necessarily need to give a damn about Ruby btw, because the more they can look at the product from the customer and market point of view, the better they'll help you. As in, they'll educate you on the market, and you'll educate them on what the technical constraints are, and this process will allow creating a great product that the market wants - and is ready to pay for.<p>In your search, you'll need to accept that the person you'll hire should have the duty and power to challenge your every product/market assumption. If you think this would be ridiculous, let me ask you this.<p>- Before starting to offer your product, how did you do the market study? If you just looked at the competition, you haven't done a tenth of what you should.
- Did you engage with potential customers? If it was just a handful of customers with similar profiles, this isn't significant enough.
- Did you decide on such an insufficient basis what was interesting to them and what wasn't? How did you determine how to price your offers... You get the drift.<p>At the very start of a business, the responsibility for marketing should be with the product manager. If you have one and if he could not / did not do this marketing work, then you need to have a marketer that can work very closely with your product manager, but does not report to him. If your product manager is actually a technical lead, you need to first hire a product lead.<p>So to sum up, your hiring priority should be:<p>1) hire a product manager with some marketing abilities. this is a generalist with good design, marketing, and management skills, and some technical skill to understand what is being done by the dev team. Worst mistake you can do is have your product lead focus on building and forget about all the rest he needs to do.<p>2) hire a marketing person who is a marketing specialist, either from their subject matter studying, or from their experience. Either way this should be someone very analytical, and with some applied knowledge of sales so that their role can span from product development to sales strategy and support.<p>3) hire a tech sales person who can speak the language of your customers. If they are all devs, then someone with dev and sales skills. If they are managers, someone more sales oriented should be preferred, with only an understanding of the tech being a requirement.