Getting the first ones is the hardest thing you'll do. You've got the product and the vision. What you don't have is the time to also become a marketer. That's the part I take.

Eight years of growing startups people talk about. Mailchimp, back when I was an intern and it was still a scrappy Atlanta startup, before it became the largest bootstrapped exit in history. Lime, when it was the fastest-growing startup in the country. Built In, as their first-ever customer marketer. Bumble, running global partnerships with Google, Apple, and Meta. Then Cintrifuse Capital, where I built a growth and platform function from scratch.

Across all of it, the same job. Make people care about something new, then turn that into customers. I build the brand, find the channels, run the experiments, and get on the phone to close the first deals. The whole growth engine, before you're big enough to hire one.