Why founders get stuck

Okay, so why does this matter?

Why is the Foundational Five so important and why do so many founders and early-stage operators get stuck? There are a handful of reasons:

One is that there's just so much bad advice out there. Most of it focusing purely on tactics. "You should test this channel." "If you're not using this tool to automate your marketing, you're missing out." "This trick brought us 100 more customers overnight." Lots of "what you could do" and very little "here's what you SHOULD do."

Here's the thing: Coming up with tactical ideas is not hard. Building a foundation that is aligned for growth, that's the hard part, and it's the part that matters the most. I don't care what tactic or fancy tools you're using. If your model is not optimized for your market, if your product isn't engineered for your channel, they're not going to save you.

Foundational misalignment results in people visiting your website and having no idea what you offer, and they immediately leave. It leads to false negatives on channels that would've otherwise been massive growth levers. The issues that misalignment creates are endless.

Another problem

Now, another really, REALLY common problem that we see with our founders in particular is that they're taught that product-market fit is all that matters. Crack PMF and the users will flow in, right?

They spend all their time investing in the product, seeking that product-market fit, while neglecting all the other pieces of the foundation. And as a result, we see that growth is bolted on as an afterthought.

They're seeing decent retention; users are saying they love the product, and then they just add a channel in the ninth inning when they feel they're ready to scale. Only to be massively disappointed when the users DON'T start pouring in. Or when they discover their unit economics don't work, and they have no scalable and economical way to grow.

Now, I'll also add that so many people are taught from the classic startup playbooks. "Move fast and break things." Build quickly, test quickly, get feedback quickly, iterate quickly. On one hand, there's merit to some of them. We've seen those playbooks work, but not without some serious downsides. It overlooks a very important concept, which I'm trying to drill home right now, namely the entirety of the foundation.

It implies again that PMF is all that matters. It implies that strategic thinking and systems design aren't important for startups. More often than not, that leads to startups spinning in circles or zigzagging all over the place as they're purely in a reactive state.

That can be avoided with a systems design approach.