The Founder-Led Growth Playbook

I'm excited to share my Founder-Led Growth Playbook, in collaboration with First Round Capital.

The full article is quite long, and I know you’re busy, so here are the five key takeaways:

1. When are you actually ready to focus on growth?

You're ready to focus on growth when you have a live product and some happy customers - typically 10 for B2B or 500 for B2C. Before this point, focus on finding product/market fit. After that, you can turn to discovering who your ideal customers are and how to get more of them.

I learned this lesson the hard way. My team and I have tried working with founders before this point, but it's hard without some base of customer insights.

2. The 3-step process to identify your biggest growth levers

Follow the three-step process from my book Growth Levers and How to Find Them:

1. Understand the journey that leads prospects to you. Interview your customers to understand what's driving (or stalling) action using Jobs to be Done.

2. Map your growth model. Use data to find the bottlenecks where you can focus for maximum impact.

3. Run growth sprints. Pinpoint a specific lever you want to test, designed to tackle these bottlenecks and optimize growth, and run experiments against it.

   
   

3. Running proper growth experiments (even with small sample sizes)

I outline the Growth Sprints process in the article, but don’t skip the important steps of:

1. Formulate an explicit hypothesis to clarify your thinking

2. Make and document predictions to eliminate hindsight bias

3. Document your results to keep future hires from reinventing those wheels.

Bonus: Here’s my 20 Scrappy Startup Growth Experiment ideas PDF, with instructions and examples.

4. The only metrics that matter at early stage

While revenue is the ultimate business goal, it's a lagging indicator in early stages. 

Instead, focus on leading indicators:

Growth stage: Track customer engagement metrics like Weekly Active Users, repeat transactions, or usage minutes - these predict sustainable revenue.

Pre-growth stage: Before you have meaningful user numbers, measure learning velocity: count customer conversations where you learned something new, and experiments that produce validated insights.

The right metrics evolve with your business: learning → engagement → revenue → profit.

5. When to hire your first growth people (and who to avoid)

Only hire after you've figured out at least one growth lever yourself. Your job is to master it first, then hire people who can scale it.

My best growth hires? Analytical thinkers with a bias for action - often former scientists with zero marketing experience but strong people skills. I start with junior or mid-level hires, rather than building the team top-down.

The most expensive mistake founders make:

"If you don't know how to grow your business yourself, you're not hiring someone to run growth, you're hiring someone to figure it out. That's a hard job, and people who can do it well are starting their own companies, not working for a teeny fraction of yours."

You can read or listen to the full article here. Let me know what you think.