The Wartime CMO (1/7)
An obsession with growth solves all problems.
In 2012 Paul Graham—founder of Y Combinator—published one of the most iconic essays about building successful startups, titled “Startups = Growth”.
He starts out:
A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.
(...) The good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place. Which means you can use growth like a compass to make almost every decision you face.
An obsession with growth solves all other problems.
Paul Graham is not the only person to think this.
Eric Schmidt—former Executive Chairman and CEO of Google—used to say that “revenue solves all known problems”. Y Combinator uses “growth solves (nearly) all problems” as a tagline to drive the same point home.
Famous venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, writes:
Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure.
(..) engineers are biassed toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make this happen, and it's harder than it looks.
Whether you are a startup founder, a scale-up CMO or otherwise tasked with marketing, it’s good to have clarity about why people hired you:
Your job is to drive explosive user growth!
At the end of the day, CMOs have the shortest tenure in the C-suite.
CMOs are fired faster than any other strategic decision-makers.
The CMO’s job is to get the users.
Without users flocking to the product, the company dies.
If you cannot find a predictable, scalable way to acquire users… you will either be replaced, or the company will die.
That’s harsh, but that’s how it works.
No pressure.
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Wartime CMOs understand this.
Compared to working for an incumbent, the cards are stacked against you. You don’t have strong brand recognition and there is no time to dilly-dally around with cute campaign concepts.
It’s now, or never.
Wartime CMOs are ruthless, and willing to go down to the tactical level to get every last issue resolved. It’s a spirit of hustle, grit and elbow grease.
The good news though, is that once you have more users, more revenue and more brand equity… all other problems become much easier to solve—so faster growth really does solve nearly all your other problems!
Faster growth… demonstrates that you’ve probably found something interesting.
Faster growth… is exciting, and people want to be on your team: engineers, investors, and new customers. Everyone wants to be where the excitement is.
Faster growth… means investors will want to speak to you
Faster growth… means you can raise funding at higher valuations, so you dilute less equity
Faster growth… gives you more customers, so you can iterate faster
Faster growth… just means you’re building a more profitable company, faster
So, please…
Make growth your obsession
Growth is the only thing that matters.
Growth solves all your problems.
Don't get distracted with shiny objects.
And as you’ll see tomorrow, not all growth is created equal.
It turns out that what you really want is one specific kind of growth: compounding growth.
Compounding growth is what leads to hockey stick-shaped, exponential growth. That’s the only type of growth that VC investors can really invest in.
Tomorrow, we’ll show you what is needed to achieve compounding growth.
It’s beautiful, and mathematical.
See you tomorrow!
—Team Double
P.S.
As you might have noticed, we use the P.S. here for small announcements and other messages non-essential to the core insight of the email.
Just wanted to remind you that—if you haven’t already—you should really download the cheatsheet of the 38 Laws of Growth. It’s really a helpful point of reference:
Download the 38 Laws of Growth »
P.P.S.
In summary, the Wartime CMO mindset means:
Growth solves all problems
Be ruthless. The early days need hustle, grit and elbow grease
Don’t get distracted by cool campaigns or vanity metrics. Only revenue counts
Do things that don’t scale.
Speak to your users. Jump on sales calls. Close deals.
Long-term, focus on building systems (about which we’ll tell you more, in the coming days)
Rally the team, take full ownership
Continue to the next lesson 👉🏼
Read the 38 laws of growth 👉🏼