Growth without product-market fit amplifies failure

To figure out your product market fit and how to distribute it, it's not something that you can outsource to somebody.

You don't want to focus too much on growth until you have product market fit. If you start growing a product that doesn't have product market fit, you're actually doing more damage than good because you have a product that is now being exposed to the market through growth levers that is giving a bad experience with your product.

All you're going to do is really annoy the users. Because, say, in the future they are, 'Hey, I'm still interested, but I don't want to use that product because I already tried.' It's like, 'No, no, you can totally use it now.' 'I already tried. I had a bad experience with them.'

In this context, "one" refers to a marketing hire - Emily is advising founders when they need to hire their first marketing person.

Marketing is really good at accelerating growth and doing that scale one to many. So if you're still in the very well spoke founder led sales, founder led marketing, like I'm doing discovery with each of these potential customers and have to modify my product for them, that kind of thing. You don't need one yet.

Growth team can optimize, growth can maybe lift it by 10, 15%. But if you have core product and core marketing issues, growth team will not be able to fix them for you.

Growth team can optimize, growth can maybe lift it by 10, 15%. Maybe that's enough for you. Even that is on the upper end of what growth team will be able to do if there is a slow-down trajectory.

If you have core product and core marketing issues, growth team will not be able to fix them for you. You're going to have to address the big elephant in the room as to why business is slowing down in the first place.