Startup Advice bankeronwheel November 16, 2025 0 Comments

Growth Isn’t a Rat Race—Stop Running Laps for Someone Else’s Trophy

Let me guess: you’re a founder, and somewhere between your third coffee and a doom-scroll through LinkedIn, you see another startup crowing about a fresh funding round, a splashy partnership, or some viral nonsense. Suddenly, your heart rate spikes. You wonder if you’re the only one who missed the memo about the “right” way to grow. Relax. I’ve been around this block enough times to know that most founders are like hamsters, sprinting in circles on a wheel built from other people’s headlines. Here’s the ugly truth: chasing whatever the market fawns over at the moment is a fantastic way to burn time and money, all while moving precisely nowhere.

You want real, gut-level, compounding growth? Swallow your pride, step off the hype treadmill, and choose your own damn race. Once you stop flailing after every shiny trend and start building—intentionally, methodically, maybe even quietly—you’ll find that growth doesn’t have to feel like a Sisyphean sprint. It can be repeatable. It can be earned. It can even—dare I say it—make sense.

Here are seven lessons I wish someone had tattooed on my forehead before I wasted years chasing everyone else’s tail lights.

1. Applause Is Cheap—Solve a Problem People Would Miss

You want to know why so many startups flame out? They build for claps, not for customers. It’s tempting, I get it. Social media adoration and investor back-pats feel like progress. But the only growth that matters is when users would riot if you disappeared. Paul Graham beats this drum endlessly: traction isn’t loud; it’s sticky. Skip the vanity circus. Build features and systems that quietly burrow into your users’ lives. They won’t tweet about it—but they’ll stick around, and that’s what compounds.

2. Forget the “Magic Channel”—Find What Actually Converts

Here’s a dirty secret: the customer acquisition hacks du jour rarely work outside of Medium posts. So you saw a B2C app go viral on TikTok. Who cares? You’re selling a compliance tool to insurance brokers. Copy-pasting go-to-market fads is how you end up broke and bewildered. The moment you stop shoehorning your business into what’s “hot,” you can experiment like an adult. Maybe that means dusting off industry events or striking up partnerships—if that’s where your customers are. Great founders aren’t trend-chasers, they’re pipeline-builders.

3. Stop Measuring Your Seedling Against Someone Else’s Redwood

Comparison is a hell of a drug. You see a Series B darling lighting up TechCrunch and panic that your roadmap is stuck in first gear. Mariam Naficy once said, “Tempo is a strategy.” She’s right. Some startups ride a tidal wave. Others need to build the damn harbor first. When you let go of someone else’s timeline, you finally start making decisions based on your actual constraints: cash, team, market readiness. That’s when the fires you’re fighting are real, not imaginary.

4. Feature Parity Is a Mirage—Build a Product Ecosystem, Not a Buffet

I’ve watched founders exhaust themselves building every feature a competitor offers, convinced they’re “catching up.” Spoiler: you’re not. The best products don’t win on checklists; they win on coherence. One founder I know built three modules just because a rival had them. After killing two, their activation rate soared by 28%. Focus isn’t just a virtue; it’s your only shot at clarity.

5. Headcount Theater Will Bankrupt You—Hire Like a Surgeon, Not a Shopper

Want to torch your runway? Start hiring just to look big. I’ve seen founders admit, sometimes through gritted teeth, that they made hires purely for the optics—resume logos, fancy titles, the works. The founders who survive are the ones who hire problem solvers, not LinkedIn influencers. Here’s how to check yourself:

| Stage | What You Actually Need | What You Think You Need |

|—————|——————————-|———————————|

| Seed | Fast-learning generalists | Narrow-scope specialists |

| Early Revenue | Systems-building operators | Senior leaders without systems |

| Pre-Series A | Bottleneck-busting owners | Bloated teams that slow you |

Pin that to your wall. Please.

6. Retention Is the Bedrock—Acquisition Is Just a Sugar Rush

Every rookie founder gets high off top-of-funnel numbers. It looks great on a pitch deck. But Brian Balfour nailed it: retention is the only foundation that matters. If your product can’t keep people around, you’ve built a leaky bucket. Focus on making your existing customers’ lives better—more value, more reasons to stay. Do that, and suddenly your LTV soars, your cohorts look less like ski slopes, and your revenue stops giving you ulcers.

7. Trust Your Instincts—You’ve Earned Them the Hard Way

Here’s what the startup playbooks won’t tell you: intuition is forged in the crucible of hundreds of dumb mistakes, awkward calls, and dead-ends. But if you’re constantly chasing the industry’s approval, you’ll drown out your own hard-won gut. Some of the best pivots in startup history happened when founders ignored the noise. Stewart Butterfield didn’t pivot to Slack because it was cool; he did it because his team needed it. Build for conviction, not applause. That’s how you get a product people actually care about.

Look, I’m not here to sell you some founder fairy tale. Growth won’t ever be easy—but it gets a hell of a lot less miserable when you stop running someone else’s race. When you finally trust your own experience, your own market, your own gut, you’ll carve a lane that fits you. The founders who build legacies aren’t the fastest or the loudest. They’re just the ones stubborn enough to build for themselves.

Here’s your cheat sheet, in plain English: