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

1. A great product will speak for itself.

2. Marketing is beneath them.

3. They have PMF and are ready for scalable go-to-market tactics and teams.

My job is to deliver the antidote: personally sell until you have 100 customers.

Technical founders who write software get caught up in systems thinking, and approaching early go-to-market the same way inevitably leads to scaling the wrong message to the wrong people in the wrong channels. Making the effort

Do some unscalable things.

• Manually DM 1000 people who should be buyers. Automation will not work.

• Plan

• 
  

I then ask (but not in so few words) -

1. If your product's so great, why aren't people buying?

2. What tactics have you made to drive adoption?Marketing is a key responsibility of the founders.

3. If you don't have at least $1M ARR you don't have product-market fit.

The promise of PLG - the idea that the product itself is the primary driver of acquisition, conversion, and expansion - does not hold up before you've

1. When I dig in, , and I ask what they've done. When I meet them, the first thing I do is understand their company fundamentals, then ask what they've done. Usually, founders with less than a million in ARR tell me they've focused on building the product and writing content, but no one's reading it or adopting the product. They've taken the poison, believing that a product will grow on its own merit and often thinking that marketing and self-promotion are beneath them.

What I tell them is to do unscalable things, which may feel beneath them, but are crucial. For example, reaching out to 2,000 people, planning dinners as high-funnel offers, hosting webinars or courses about their ICP’s main pain, and applying to speak at developer conferences.

Without these efforts, they'll never achieve the necessary distribution or know what type of DevRel, marketers, or salespeople to hire. You can't enact PLG strategies before proving PMF the hard or normal way.