Paul Singh has a message that Atlantic Canadian startups need to listen to.

Singh is the founder of Disruption Corp. in Arlington, Va., which recently announced a $50 million post-seed fund for startups.

Last year, when he was working for another investor group called 500 Startups, he visited Halifax twice. He will return next month to be one of the speakers at the Atlantic Venture Forum.

Frequently, when he travels, he sends out tweets along the lines of the one he posted May 20, which said:

“How to build a Silicon Valley in your own city:

1. Focus on importing urgency.

2. Recognize that #1 is hard. Do more of it.”

Singh preaches urgency quite a bit, and tweeted about the need for it last September when he attended the MentorCamp in Halifax. He may do it again next month. And he probably should. East Coast startups need more of a sense of urgency, especially when it comes to selling their product.

Consider some of the data recently collected from the Entrevestor survey of East Coast startups in January and February. We received figures for 148 startups in the region, and 76 had revenue of $10,000 or less last year.

Yes, more than half the startups that we surveyed had virtually no sales. In Nova Scotia, 56 per cent of the startups fit into this group, compared with 51 per cent in New Brunswick.

(To avoid being called a fear monger, I should add that the other half of the respondents include many companies with impressive revenues. The sales numbers among these companies rose about 30 per cent in 2013.)

So why do we have so many companies with low or no revenue? One reason is the startup community is young, with about one-quarter of the companies only one year old. About 70 per cent are less than three years old. Also, many life sciences companies need years of product refinement and regulatory clearance before they bring in revenue.

But I think the more likely reason is that there is simply not enough of a sense of urgency — to use Singh’s term — in the collective sales missions in our startups. Of course, there are some great business development and sales people in the community. There just aren’t enough of them.

This could be a huge problem before too long because all those young companies are hitting puberty. There’s a broad swath of companies that have been around for a few years and have raised a few hundred thousand dollars in seed financing. They’re looking for more capital to grow.

In my discussions with venture capital investors lately, I’ve been hearing one clear message: they’re not interested in investing in companies that don’t have strong and growing sales.

If you don’t have those sales and you’re running out of money, the situation might become, well, urgent.

It’s a message Paul Singh might just raise again when he visits Halifax next month.