Extremely difficult to make Solo Eng founders understand how growth works.

Consulted 6 early stage (pre-seed & seed kinda startups) and some key observations and patterns seen in Young AI founders (young as in founders from eng orgs, with no idea about what is growth, no idea about how startups work, what is 0-1 , what is PMF etc)

Observations :

  1. Solo Engineering founders who are great with product understanding roadmap etc mostly have zero idea about how growth works, they have no clue about the stages of growth what channels work for awareness what for acquisition, what is lead gen what are ads, and they just compare their product to a series A+ company in their domain and try to do just the same (without even realising they probably have 1/100 of the marketing budget of their competitors)
  2. ⁠No strategy (Not blaming them but its an exposure problem) instead of listening to their growth advisors they would rather listen to a competitor founders podcast and instantly copy) , they simply want to copy the market without knowing the nuances eg: someone doing X launches they want to do it too, without understanding the quality of users they would attract, whats the spend that goes behind shiny launches on X (agencies like atomik, charge 75k for amplification for 1M views(yes just views not even users) and 30k for launch videos
  3. ⁠Usual CAC comes around 1000$ which does not even make sense if you are not catering to enterprises
  4. ⁠Shaky Decision making : every day they hear a new podcast, read a blog, read another founders post they want to change the strategy without realising how much efforts it would take, do we even need that channel to attract customers at this point in product life stage, and since they are solo founders they just rely on their own gut feeling and do not even understand the depth of abandoming a channel or moving to next , plus zero patience for organic content flywheel.
  5. ⁠Concepts are so weak that if they push a blog or a post on Linkedin they expect it to work isntantly and get them 100 signups without realising how content on social media and SEO AEO works , what is seeding , positioning changes every month, new features every week , with barely any users and the most surprising thing is they get investor interests just like that (ofc gets rejected in DD but yes extremely true)

Honestly yime to step back and have some realisation and walk away from FOMO , understand your customers, understand why PMF is imp, yes growth is imp, but understand how growth even works, you can keep shipping new features every week with 1000$ marketing budget but atleast get 10 real customers, who are the new features even for????

Not to offend anyone here but just to add perspective to how the industry is rushing and what all channels are worth exploring; appropriate for the stage of product/company

As a growth person, I have no intent of making you spend more, the entire goal is to make you understand what is the best for your product and stage of the company

Author: figuring___out