The Most Common Mistakes Founders Make in Their Quest to Scale
Avoiding shortcuts and overcorrections when scaling your startup
Much of my focus over my career has been on bringing new startups and products to market. I recently wrote about the importance of architecting the initial growth engine, and in another article, I highlighted the importance of the early founder grind to get those first customers.
That grind, doing things that don’t scale, is step one. It’s how you get close to customers, validate product/market fit, and build the foundation for growth. Once PMF looks strong, the next challenge is scaling top-of-funnel volume to optimize and refine a full growth system.
And this is where I see many founders make their most common mistakes.
Mistake 1: Outsourcing Growth
Hiring an agency or part-time consultant to “develop a channel” feels like progress. You’re putting money into ads, you’re running campaigns — but the problem is that growth doesn’t come from isolated channels.
It doesn’t matter whether you make this move before or after PMF:
Too early, and you’re trying to skip the “do things that don’t scale” stage.
Later, and you’re still missing the bigger picture — agencies and consultants optimize campaigns, not systems.
They won’t have the context or the incentive to stitch together the interdependent pieces of a growth engine. Without that, you’ll spend money, see some clicks, and still have no system for repeatable, profitable growth.
Mistake 2: Founder Overcorrects
When agencies or consultants fail, many founders swing the pendulum the other way. They dive into channel execution themselves: learning Google or Meta ads from the ground up while also building product, managing teams, fundraising, and keeping the business running.
While a founder can be a great architect of the full system, they should not be the one rolling up their sleeves to learn and execute day-to-day channel work, particularly if they are the CEO.
Trying to do both spreads you too thin and ultimately limits the company’s potential.
The Solution: Follow the Sequence
The way out of these traps is simple: understand the sequence.
Validate PMF through the grind. Get close to customers by doing things that don’t scale.
Architect the growth system. As founder or by bringing in a specialist. The key is to design the system, not chase a channel.
Drive top-of-funnel flow. Not because it’s the long-term growth engine, but because you need enough flow to validate and refine the system.
Top-of-funnel volume matters… but only at the right time, and only when you’re clear on why you’re driving it. The purpose is to shape the system, not to “scale fast” at all costs.
Why Full-Time Obsession Matters
Once you hit the stage of driving top-of-funnel flow, the question becomes: how do you staff it?
The answer: with full-time obsession.
Developing a channel takes constant iteration and deep learning. Agencies and part-time consultants can’t deliver this. You need someone fully dedicated to mastering the channel, running experiments, and feeding insights back into the system.
Two Good Options for Full-Time Focus
1. AI-powered hungry junior hire
The right junior hire, armed with GenAI, can master channels faster and at a fraction of the cost of an experienced marketer.
Most recent grads are AI-native, which helps.
Risk: hunger and drive are hard to vet. Without them, they’ll stall. With them, they can be game-changing.
I’ll be writing a deeper article on this next, because the rise of AI-native juniors has the potential to reshape how startups think about early marketing hires.
2. Vetted offshore full-time talent
Must be full-time and focused only on your business.
The right offshore hire can cost 80% less than a domestic one.
Often available on a month-to-month basis, giving you flexibility as needs evolve.
With proper vetting, you can land someone who’s already highly skilled.
That’s why vetting is absolutely essential here and why I recommend GrowthPair (also the reason I joined as an advisor).
Both paths work. What matters is that you have full-time, focused execution feeding into the growth system, under the oversight of a growth architect.
Where I Net Out
Growth isn’t about picking a channel. It’s about knowing where you are in the journey and why you’re trying to drive top-of-funnel flow.
The “why” should always point back to architecting and validating a scalable, profitable growth system. Once you’re clear on that, you can staff the channel work properly: full-time, focused, and feeding into the bigger engine you’re building.
That’s how you avoid the common traps and move from founder grind to breakout growth.