Why should founders lead growth at first?

In the early stages, it can be tempting to outsource it. And I talk to a lot of founders who fall into that thinking. They justify it by saying they're not a growth expert, they don't have a marketing background, they're not comfortable doing sales, they're too busy working on the product, and so forth.

Why Founders Must Lead Growth

But as we’ve covered, growth is not a subset of a startup. It is what a startup exists to do.

And if growth is the core objective, how can anyone but the founder be the one to lead it in the early days?

Founders have full system visibility. You know how the entire system has been built. You understand the risky assumptions. You're the one who's able to do that foundational systems design. You have the authority to make the high-leverage decisions that true growth requires (those hard decisions that can’t be measured and require thinking like an artist).

So on one hand, founders are simply better positioned to fill the growth seat from a leverage standpoint.

Why Outsourcing Early Rarely Works

On the other hand, it’s just really freakin’ hard to outsource growth until you’ve actually built a stable and scalable growth engine.

So often, we talk to founders who tell us they have spent years going through multiple heads of growth, only to be right where they started.

Let’s examine why that happens:

First, they hire the wrong person. Which makes complete sense.

After all, if your growth engine doesn’t exist, how could you possibly know who to hire?

Which brings up a really important point: not all growth experts are made equal.

This is made even trickier given how nebulous “growth” is (and why we spent all this defining it). At the highest level, most growth practitioners are good at… you guessed it!... growing stuff. But more specifically, they’re good at scaling. 

But architecting and standing up a growth engine from scratch?

That’s a whole other beast. And the subset of people who specialize in that area is much smaller. 

And finally, how do you hire a good growth person if you can't even speak the language of the most important objective for your business?

Sure, you might be able to get away with hiring a customer support manager without having a lot of customer support experience. You can hire an HR manager without having a ton of HR experience. The success of those roles is not dependent on having a scalable, systems-aligned foundation.

But growth?

Growth is the foundation. It’s about as high-stakes as it gets. If you get growth wrong, especially in the early days, your company fails. So you need to understand it deeply before you can effectively hire someone to scale what you've built.