What is the most common and costly mistake founders make in growth?

Jason Lemkin · May 27, 2024

Smart founders' most common fatal error is stubbornly sticking with bad executives and bad decisions for too long

He watched a founder let a broken sales org run for five or six quarters because he had money, ending in a forced sale while a near-peer competitor is now worth $20B

30:15 Stubbornly keeping bad executives and decisions too long is the costliest mistake

Casey Winters · Sep 22, 2021

The biggest mistake founders make with growth teams is picking the wrong metric — they should choose an activity metric that best correlates to value being experienced at the frequency they expect

Too many optimize MAU when it makes no sense, or GMV when it isn't the right signal

38:29 Picking the wrong activity metric not correlated to value and frequency is the costliest mistake

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

The most common, expensive and irreversible growth mistake founders make is assuming user pain points that turn out to be false, especially misjudging what a user must learn in their first session

Wrong assumptions mean you spend all your effort running up the wrong wall

51:10 Assuming false user pain points especially in first session is the costliest mistake

Hila Qu · Jan 18, 2023

Moving fast on experiments without first securing stakeholder buy-in is a costly mistake, because winning experiments then meet resistance at implementation

Even a successful experiment result faces so much resistance in implementing the winner when stakeholders weren't brought along

46:50 Moving fast on experiments without stakeholder buy in causes costly implementation resistance

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

The biggest mistake growth teams make is launching experiments without first assessing cost, effort and audience size, so they can never reach statistical significance

When he digs in, the answer to 'is the audience big enough to learn the outcome' is usually no

23:00 Launching experiments without checking audience size for statistical significance is the costliest mistake

Adam Grenier · Mar 15, 2023

Most companies' growth problems are not that they haven't found the right channel but that they lack product-market fit, are pointed in the wrong direction, or have solved too narrow a problem

When consulting he is inevitably pulled into 'what's the next channel' questions, but the underlying issue is usually existential rather than operational

46:52 Believing the problem is channel selection when its actually lack of pmf or wrong direction is the most common mistake