Every week, I get 1-3 messages from technical founders me asking for help on their growth. Many of the founders still under $500k ARR hold three poisonous beliefs:

1. A great product will speak for itself.

2. Marketing is beneath them.

3. They already have PMF and are ready to scale go-to-market tactics and teams.

If people drinking poison come to me, I deliver the antidote, a harsh truth: you need to earn the right to scale. That means you need to personally sell until you have 100 customers.

Founders who write code often get caught in systems thinking. They want a scalable, repeatable engine—but that mindset leads to scaling the wrong message to the wrong people in the wrong channels.

You need to do things that don’t scale.

• Manually DM 1,000 people who should be using your product. Automation won’t work.

• Host events (dinners, streams, hackathons, workshops).

• Build templates and demos that are useful to your ICP.

• Attend events (apply to speak, sponsor a booth, and just show up places and network).

• Have more coffees and lunches and zoom calls than you are comfortable with.

Don't you dare hire someone to do the work for you until you've proven what works. Yes, it’s grunt work. But it’s the only path to true product-market fit.

So I ask (not always so bluntly):

• If your product’s so great, why isn’t anyone using it?

• What have you done to drive adoption?

• Why don’t you think marketing is your job?

If you don’t have at least $1M ARR, you don’t have PMF.

And without PMF, the promise of PLG—that the product drives its own growth—doesn’t hold up.

You have to earn PMF the hard way before any scalable tactic works.
Until then, the only path forward is doing things that feel unscalable and beneath you—because they’re not.