You likely don’t understand growth

I think most founders genuinely make growth-related decisions from a perspective that is actually so fundamentally flawed, that I genuinely feel the need to sugarcoat my thinking to some extent so as not to enter any sort of weird memetic rivalries with founders reading this, lol.

Now, as rude or presumptuous as that may sound, it’s how I feel, so I want to express the thought rather than self-censor needlessly, and hopefully readers who can handle the brutal honest truth will stick around, which feels like a good way to filter out any wantra-preneurs that otherwise might contact me.

So, let’s unpack this idea, because I think once you understand my perspective, and once I fully flesh out the idea, you’ll realize it’s not intended to be rude, and instead it’s just how people deep into growth feel generally - so let’s jump in:

Nailing growth (not just doing a good job) is far, far more existential than most venture backed founders think it is.

First, allow me to just walk you through a quick hypothetical to illustrate what I’m talking about (growth metrics are the bottom 6):

Startup A:

Projected revenue in 24 months: ~$1.6 M/mo after 24 months

Startup B:

Projected revenue in 24 months: ~$3.1 M/mo after 24 months

Next, let’s take a real example of another principle I don’t think most founders get:

When Whatnot raised ~$150M led by a16z, it became incredible difficult for Popshop, a live streaming shopping startup I had been advising for years, which was not far behind WhatNot in terms of revenue, to raise another round. It went from neck and neck in the US live-streaming shopping arms race, to us being effectively asphyxiated by investors’ leming-like thinking.

It happens more than you might think..

Next, imagine you’re a healthy snack startup founder wanting to get into grey-hat SEO, a trend Forbes Marketplace (the division selling ad placements in all the listicles on Forbes) makes ~$500M/year off of, and all-in probably drives close to $50-100B in global online purchasing behavior..

And you go find articles like these or these ranking very high for a lot of popular google searches related to the subject:

And you contact the owners, find out ¾ are owned by the same guy, maybe someone like my friend I wrote about here, and you get a response like the below:

hey hey! I’m very close with the brands you see listed in the top 5/6 slots in almost all my articles (and have 6-7 figure per year guarantees + high revenue split deals with w/ most of them), but we don’t have long term partnerships with the brands listed 7-10 those article yet, if you’re open to discussing those slots? typically slots start at $10K/mo + % once we pass a certain threshold of sales for the lower spots.

And the other person responds and asks for an absurd monthly rate that doesn’t make sense and cites the reason for it is because they have many large enterprise clients that pay very well.

See how easily not taking this absurdly seriously as a founder or VPoM/Growth can screw you?

And by the way, the roughly 2-3% of venture-backed founders I engage with the that think about things like I do, are the few I can think of that are now in high 8/ low 9 figure range… and I usually become closest with these folks.. neither of which feel like coincidences.

Btw, if you enjoyed this and haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend you read my post titled How I think about growth

Luckily, I think the venture ecosystem/environment is getting healthier and I do feel like I’m noticing a trend towards caring about metrics earlier and earlier.

Which is great news for me and my business, and makes for more fun engagements.

 
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