Own growth personally before hiring - delegation is a slow way to learn
Founders should get hands-on with growth channels themselves rather than hiring someone to figure it out. The process of discovering growth levers provides critical customer insights that inform every aspect of the business.
When to use
Early stage when tempted to make a growth hire to take growth off your plate
Don't do this
Hiring a Head of Growth to figure out growth when you yourself do not know how your business grows
16 Founders Who Did This
Advises founders that they would never hire someone to be head of product before making the first product - same applies to growth
Read 6-7 books on B2B sales and personally handled all customer meetings until Series A, rather than hiring salespeople
Gave personal phone number to every early user for direct support, ensuring proper usage and building personal relationships at scale
Mark personally executed the free redesign strategy repeatedly learning firsthand what content went viral before delegating
Founders personally created and posted TikTok content daily rather than hiring influencers or delegating. Only scaled with additional accounts after finding winning formats themselves.
Ramone personally runs marketing with contractors for specific verticals, researching competitor growth strategies and building systems like Notion content libraries
Closed the first 15 enterprise customers himself (Instacart, LinkedIn, DoorDash, Autodesk) through consultative founder-led sales, listening to understand problems rather than pitching solutions
Built and ran detailed Excel financial model himself from day one until $200M ARR, including monthly coffee spend. Refused to delegate FP&A to outsourced CFO. Every investment tied to a cell in the model.
Personally owned influencer outreach and content strategy, finding hard-to-locate contacts, uncovering rising stars, writing custom scripts matching influencer tone
During Cash App's hypergrowth, tried extreme productivity hacks (all-async, parallel processing) instead of hiring replacements for his functions
Deliberately allocated 50-60% of time to sales and marketing activities, only 40-50% on content delivery, working 35-40 hour weeks
Deliberately avoided hiring for 2 years post-YC, growing to nearly $1M ARR before making a single hire outside the founding team. Founders personally handled sales, support, and marketing.
Personally closed first $500K in sales through 100-150 customer conversations despite having no sales experience. Reframed constant incompetence as her job description, learning each function before finding specialists.
Wasted nearly a year without customer conversations, then one afternoon of user interviews revealed UX blockers. Also wasted 6 months on side projects instead of focusing on Data Fetcher
Personally handled manual edge cases and got hands dirty with the dirty parts of the product rather than delegating to others
Identifies three founder growth failure modes: overthinkers who theorize, underthinkers who build blindly, and delegaters who hire experts without context