Doing What Doesn't Scale

Every founder wants to find the right marketing channel and scale it fast. The problem is that scaling requires a pattern — and when you're company is in its early stages, you don't have one yet. You have a product nobody knows about, a website nobody is visiting, and a growth strategy that doesn't exist. That's the cold start problem. And the only way through it is to do things that don't scale.

Yeah. Sorry. Not what you wanted to hear.

Imagine deciding you want to start a pizza restaurant and your strategy begins with launching 10 locations across the US. You have no idea if anybody wants your pizza, let alone what the cultural differences are in marketing these ten locations across various states. Often, founders try to figure out whether a strategy can scale before they even try it out.

But here's the thing. The founders who grow fastest aren't the ones who identified the perfect channel on day one. They're the ones who ran smart experiments, learned quickly, and scaled what actually worked.

The cold start problem every early stage startup faces

Early stage founders are wired to recognize patterns so they can scale them. But you can't scale what doesn't exist yet. Before you have data, you have to generate it. Before you have a repeatable growth motion, you have to find one.

There are three things I recommend founders do simultaneously to get there:

1. Study your competition and market to identify potential growth strategies
2. Understand which go-to-market (GTM) motions make sense for your product
3. Run growth experiments with the explicit goal of learning — not scaling

Let's break each of these down.

What your competition and market can tell you about growth strategy

Learn from your competitors — without copying them

If there's a product in market that you'll compete with for market share, look closely at what they're doing. You'll likely find a shortcut or two you can adapt and make your own.

Look at a competitor and ask:

• What marketing channels are they using — social, email, blog, podcast, events? How are they positioning each one, and to whom?
• What does their LinkedIn company page reveal about their team structure? Are they sales-heavy or marketing-heavy?
• How is their website structured? Do they have pages for different personas or use cases?
• What does the founder talk about publicly? Is there a thought leadership angle they're owning?

You'll find things they're doing well that you can match, and things they're not doing at all, like founder thought leadership, where you can set yourself apart.

Let the market tell you what not to do

Do you know how your prospect actually wants to buy? Do you know what messages will resonate with them?

Many founders skip this step, and it's one of the most expensive mistakes you can make. The market can tell you what doesn't work so you don't waste time on strategies that will never fit.

Take healthcare. If you're selling an expensive product that involves sensitive data to busy executives with IT gatekeepers, you are not generating leads through Instagram (Yes, I’ve had this conversation before). Knowing that early saves you months of wasted effort and spend.

Understanding go-to-market motions for early stage startups

GTM motions are the coordinated strategies used to generate and grow revenue. The main ones are:

• Marketing-led: Inbound, brand, and demand marketing generates leads
• Sales-led: Sales teams (BDRs, SDRs, account reps) generate leads
• Product-led: The product itself drives upsells, renewals, and referrals
• Community-led: A founder-hosted community drives leads and engagement
• Partner-led: Channel and reseller partnerships drive leads
• Ecosystem-led: Strategic partnerships with complementary products drive growth

Here's the mistake founders make: they pick one and try to scale it immediately. Wrong wrong wrong.

Instead, evaluate each motion against your actual market. Ask yourself:

• Are there potential referral or channel partners who could resell and market your product?
• What kind of marketing would your prospects actually be receptive to? What are they reading and watching?
• Does a community exist for your prospects — and would they value one?
• Are there products in your ecosystem that would benefit from co-marketing with you?

The goal at this stage is to identify which ones are worth experimenting with.

How to run growth experiments that actually teach you something

A growth experiment is an activity you try with the goal of learning — not scaling. When you're in the cold start phase, the point isn't to find the perfect strategy. It's to eliminate what doesn't work and double down on what does.

One experiment I run regularly with early stage clients: lead magnet panel webinars.

• Find a topic that resonates with your target audience. Host a panel with industry experts your prospects would recognize and want to hear from.
• Build a target list of accounts you want as customers. Invite them to the event.
• Include a clear CTA — a demo request, a conference you're attending, something they can engage with next.
• Nurture attendees with a follow-up marketing newsletter.

What you'll learn: which topics resonate, what their main pain points are, and patterns among the people who raise their hand for a demo.

You’ll also piggyback off your partner’s brand. By picking a partner who is more established in the market, you can generate early awareness and capture contact data from people who genuinely showed up to learn more about your product. 

And if nobody shows up, that's not failure — that's data. Maybe the topic didn't land. Maybe you targeted the wrong personas. Maybe you picked the wrong partner. You won't know until you try. And trying is the only way forward.

Other experiments worth running in cold start phase:

• Host an unsanctioned side event (breakfast meeting, happy hour) during a popular trade show
• Write an op-ed style LinkedIn post about the problem you solve and watch who responds
• Go to the city where your prospects are and meet them in person

Five principles for doing what doesn't scale

These apply whether you're pre-revenue or approaching your first $1M. They're the mindset shifts that separate founders who find their growth strategy from the ones who are still looking.

1. You don't need a perfect strategy. You need a first one. Stop waiting to identify the ideal approach before doing anything. Founders who do nothing while searching for the perfect plan fall further behind every week.
   
2. Every experiment has a success condition, even if it fails. Define what you're trying to learn before you run the experiment. "Nobody showed up" is useful data if you know what you were testing.
   
3. Your competition already did some of this work for you. Study what's working in your market before you invent from scratch. Adapt and improve. Don't start from zero.
   
4. The market will tell you what not to do. Listen to it. Eliminating bad-fit channels early is just as valuable as finding the right ones.
   

Scaling comes after learning, never before. Remember the pizza story? The founders who scale too early, on the wrong strategy, waste capital and time they don't have. Do the unscalable work first. Then scale what you've proven.

The real cost of waiting for the perfect growth strategy

The founders I worry about most aren't the ones who try things and fail. They're the ones who get so caught up in identifying the perfect, most optimal strategy that they end up doing nothing at all.

Inaction is the most expensive growth strategy of all.

You won't know exactly what to do. But you have to try something. Pick one experiment, run it with intention, and learn from what happens. Then do it again.

That's how you find what scales.

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