Today I want to talk about the dangers of chasing new shiny objects. Or what some call “Shiny Object Syndrome.”

Before I warn you off with the reasons why, I want to kick off by saying: I get it.

New stuff is fun. I should know, I work in advertising. And as any Mad Men fan will tell you, new is what works in advertising.

But “new” is not just fun, psychologically we’re predisposed to the “new” thanks to a cognitive bias called the ‘novelty effect.’ Our brains are hardwired to appreciate it.

Instead, the most important thing you can learn: is focus.

Today, I want to share some experience, data and and guidance that will hopefully help you replace shiny objects with focused mindfulness.

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The desire for new markets, new products, new channels

In growth and startup land, shiny object syndrome presents itself in a few ways. One is often in creative, but while creating a yapper because you’ve seen it on LinkedIn might be a distraction, it’s ultimately a temporary, quick, and cheap one.

The biggest causes for concerns are:

• New channels

• New products

• New markets

Purdy & Figg’s Jack Rubin posted this great quote a few months ago.

And if you wonder how well Purdy & Figg are doing, then know that their last filed Accounts, for the year March 2025 reported £39m of revenue up from £18m the year previously. And for most of that time they were: single product, single channel, single market.

Where does this pressure come from?

1. VCs

I was asked this by a VC when I was running my last DTC startup.

With hindsight, what I should have said was: “we’re not – if we can’t get Meta to scale to £25m turnover in the UK, we probably don’t have a business that is going to make the return you need from it.”

But at the time, I was less experienced and I remember thinking ‘hmm maybe we should?’

Diversification doesn’t only come from VC pressure, but I do hear it perioidcally from that community.

2. Ego

Before I joined Thriva as first employee in 2017, I applied for lots of roles where I had to put together case studies/marketing plans.

There were two I remember getting really excited about.

One I would have been overseeing their new TV campaign and helping think about measurement for it. The other, we were going to invest over £100k in content marketing.

Both would have had really cool deliverables. Things I could have stuck on my CV or LinkedIn and would have got lots of likes.

But, again with hindsight, the probability that those things would have turned those businesses around is like close to 0.

The truth was a lot of why I wanted to do those things was ego. If it goes well, you’re a hero. If it goes badly, hey you tried. And if nothing else you’ve got great stuff you can share and show people.

3. You’re at a growth dreaded ceiling

Now perhaps the most legitimate reason you have is that you’re at a growth ceiling.

I.e., you’re trying to push growth in your current conditions and for whatever reason you just can’t scale.

I used to include this slide in our pitch decks

The point was to show that growth is not a hockeystick curve but it’s actually a case of:

1. You potter along not doing much

2. You land on something that works and it scales hard and fast

3. You hit another ceiling and you keep pottering along

4. Repeat

And at each of those stages, you try to identify bottlenecks. And it’s true that product, market, and channel are all bottlenecks. But the one that most people ignore is your core growth engine.

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Experiment results from introducing complexity

Growth is probabilistic.

And so while the ‘focus’ argument is our default one, it’s also important we test ourselves perioidcally. And so, we’ve got a handful of experiments over the last 3.5 years from clients where complexity is added in different ways.

Given this, I wanted to share a few core hypotheses and the number of data points for and against we have. Here are the hypotheses/truths we now hold::

1. “More products or choices on site lowers the conversion rate”
   We’ve tested this systematically across eight clients. Three of those clients we’ve attempted this multiple times.
   
   The range of things here include: different flavours, product changes that suit entirely different customers, bundled extras, different payment tiers, and brand new adjacent products in a category.
   

   For: six clients supporting the hypothesis across 10 experiments.
   Against: two clients against the hypothesis across two experiments.
   
   In the ‘against’, we have one new flavour, and one bundled product extra that delivered significantly more value for the end-user. Every other instance resulted in lower conversion rate, higher CPA, worse CM3.
   

2. “Diversifying product mix on paid social increases CPA”
   This can happen as above when a new product launches, but often it comes from when a client asks ‘can we advertise these extra products we have.’ It feels like an easy win.
   
   Except, as with the above, more often than not it results in overall higher account CPA. But worst of all it diminishes the ability for us to learn and produce rocketship ads.
   
   For: five clients supporting the hypothesis across nine experiments.
   Against: two clients against the hypothesis across two experiments.
   
   The two ‘against’ clients were both brands with very large product catalogues (500+ SKUs). All of the ‘for’ were those with product catalogues under 30-50.
   

3. “Forcing a bigger first basket reduces conversion”
   This is often a result of either enforced bundling or adding extras that push people to higher purchase value.
   
   For: three clients supporting the hypothesis across three experiments.
   Against: one clients against the hypothesis across one experiments.
   

4. “Introducing a new channel will increase CPA and decrease CM3”
   We’ve tested TikTok nine or 10 times over the last 12 months. We’ve tested Pinterest twice. We’ve tested Reddit three times.
   
   One TikTok tests improve overall performance and proved to bring great CPA. But every other channel test over the last year has been a fail.
   

5. “Introducing a new market can work if the timing is right”
   The last one is one where the idea is sound, but timing is essential. We’ve run six US launches over the last 3 years. Three worked, three didn’t.
   
   Here the ones that worked were all brands spending over £100k per month consistently and had been doing so for a long time. They were also all brands that were profitable in the UK.
   
   The fails were all spending well under £100k, and were not yet at break-even in their core market.
   
   Of the ones that worked, one was almost instantaneous, the other two took six-to-twelve months. The three ‘fails’ we’re still trying to work on one, while the other two we’ve refocused efforts back to the UK.
   
   You don’t need ebit profitability to make the US work. But you should go into it when the timing is right. Having a solid engine that is scaling healthily in the UK is important.

   
   Being profitable is even better. Why? The US is expensive. Expect CPAs to be 10-50% higher. AOVs will be too, but at what cost to cash flow?

   
   Not only that but there are big behavioural differences between markets. The US likes to be sold to more aggressively than the UK does. Your premium brand-focused lifestyle imagery is not going to cut it in the US. You need creator content being super explicit about what problem you’re solving for them – and everything adjacent to it.

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Keep focus, stay calm and improve your core offering

Complexity can kill businesses. In the examples cited above, we had strong and clear experiment conditions where we’d pivot away.

Improving the growth engine is tough. It’s unknown. You have no idea whether you’re truly at a ceiling or you just haven’t found the latest thing that breaks through yet.

But it’s also where most of the time the magic happens.

Your core is also where the majority of all future revenue comes from. Secondary channels and products rarely make as much as the core one. And while a US launch does have the opportunity to help become the number one, it’s by no means gauranteed – and it’s bloody expensive to get right.

If you’re VC-backed, the chances are they’re looking for you to do £100m in turnover. If you’re not able to spend £150k per month or do £10m of turnover based on a single product, single channel, and single market, then you’re probably not going to make it to £100m either.

If you’re not, then this stuff is less relevant. If you’ve hit a ceiling at £2m of turnover, then maybe that’s fine. Only you will know if you can build the outcome you want at that level of turnover.

But know that the journey beyond your core focus is going to grow you slower. Diversification should feel like the beginning of a whole late-stage era of your business, not an early one.

Don’t get yourself into situations that are irreversible. Protect your runway. Protect optionality.

Eyes on the prize. Stay focused, and you might just find a second lease of life (and third, and fourth, and fifth).

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Josh Lachkovic is the founder of Ballpoint, a creative growth agency helping you scale ad spend from £50k to £500k per month. If you’re looking for support, then get in touch.

TL;DR

I overindexed on fear of failure as a first-time founder and with hindsight this was a huge contributor to the businesses’ failure.

“Why did Wine List fail?”

It’s been a while since someone asked me this but it came up the other day in conversation.

There’s no singular reason why my old startup Wine List failed.

In the months after I closed that busin…

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First, let me recount a conversation about an ad that took over 3 weeks of editing to go live.

“This ad isn’t going to work” the founder said.

“Well, we think there’s good reason why it could, but let’s test it,” I replied.

“So you’re not even sure”

“No – no-one can be sure, but we believe it could”

“It’s not right how it is, it needs more work.”

There are versions of this kind of conversation everywhere. With advertising and creative, there are long conversations about whether an ad is right or not. But it’s not just in advertising and creative, there are versions of this conversation that take place in every part of business.

There can be debates about which country to launch in, what product line to develop, which feature to introduce next, what software you want to bring into customer support, the list goes on.

Everyone in these environments have roughly the same motivation: they want their thing to be a success. But these debates come down to a different set of opinions on how that will work.

And most importantly separates those who hold probabilistic ways of seeing how businesses grow vs deterministic ones.

Probabilistic vs deterministic ways of thinking

Deterministic thinkers believe that actions cause direct outcomes. They love historic data and believe there’s ways to make sense of the future.

Probabilistic thinkers understand there is huge amount of uncertainty and recognise that there’s a range of possibilities based on actions.

The deterministic thinker in these debates is the one who often advocates strongly for the “right” way to do something. At a certain point something would have happened as a result of an action and therefore it shapes that world view. “Apple has exceptional design, that’s why it works – we must have exceptional design too.”

Startup growth is probabilistic

By the nature of building a startup, you are building something new without historic data. You might be category creating. Or you might be radically improving a category.

Your growth rates should be in 3-figure percent points every year for the first five years. There is no roadmap. There is no playbook. You have to learn everything for yourself. And the world around you is constantly changing.

Building and growing a startup is highly unpredictable.

Ad winners in particular are highly unpredictable

Lots of people will debate me on this, but here’s the things I personally know to be true:

1. We currently launch about 80-100 ad concepts every week

2. The majority of ad launches we deem as fails

3. No-one I have ever met can reliably predict what ad will be a winner

4. Despite this, based on other agency and startup data, we as an agency have a reasonably high “win” rate compared to others.

5. Within individual clients’ accounts, success rates improve over time as we start learning and so therefore

6. You can improve your success based on past data

7. Despite that, there is still a huge amount of randomness

8. Outsized winners – which make up the biggest growth levers – are usually the more unpredictable part of accounts

All of the above is why our creative strategy is first and foremost an experimentation strategy. The most important thing is hypothesis → test → learn, and we should aim to do that as fast as possible, document clearly, and refactor learnings as soon as we can.

We do all of this to increase the probability of finding a successful ad. But you can’t ever guarantee success. All we can do is attempt to increase the probability of success.

The decision then comes down to – at what point is it worth the cost of derisking vs the cost of testing.

The cost of deterministic thinking

I was fortunate that my first ever job was in an agency. In that job I started to see hours as billable units of time. I was a content marketer for that agency and while I wasn’t client-facing, I became astutely aware of the cost of time.

Every minute spent doing something costs money. That time can never be repurchased. There’s no refund on it. You can only spend it that way once.

And it’s not just about the direct cost of the business. Every person in the business is expected to generate a return for that business.

While it’s very easy to consider the cost of cash leaving your bank account to go to Meta, I find that no matter how smart the thinker, it is rare for people to think about the cost and potential return on an hour of time spent.

Customer development is the time well spent

As an agency we experiment all the time. Most are microexperiments – i.e., will this UGC style work for this client this week.

But we also run macro experiments – like “what approach to creative strategy should we take?” This becomes something we might broadly A/B test across our client roster where we’ll run one creative strategy method with half our clients and another with the other half.

These samples are much murkier and not pure experimentation but they constantly refine our process and thinking.

One agency-wide known we have is that the Jobs to be Done framework is highly valuable in creating good ads. We’ve landed on that from trying different frameworks (personas, to minimum viable strategy) and view that time spent learning about customers is valuable time.

Specifically talking to customers, understanding their problems, and how they dealt with those problems before they were customers of the brand in question. This for us is valuable time spent for all involved: if the brand runs the interviews and feeds back to us, or if we run the interviews as we do with our biggest clients.

What’s the value of a member of the team?

These are five of the top 15 fastest growing businesses in the UK according to the Sunday Times:

• Rheal did £19.8m of revenue with ~ 40 employees = £495k per employee

• Trip did £20m of revenue with ~ 176 employees = £113k per employee

• Ancient + Brave did £10.2m revenue with ~67 employees = £152k per employee

• Purdy and Figg did £18.3m revenue with ~69 employees = £265k per employee

• Simmer did £7.4m revenue with 57 employees = £129k per employee

Let’s assume there’s a £45k average salary, then 2.5-11x is a reasonable revenue return per employee’s cost when averaged out.

The costs of debating and testing

There’s a handful of things we need to consider here: the costs, and the potential outcomes.

Let’s run some assumptions.

At Ballpoint, we see ads in three categories: losers, maintainers, and winners.

1. Losers are ads where the CPA is unsustainably higher than the profitability target

2. Maintainers are where the CPA is in line with the profitability target for the current level of scale

3. Rocketship winners are where the is a strong improvement of CPA and therefore potential scale.

What does this look like charted?

In this example, you can see the huge impact that rocketship winners can have. This is real client data where there’s three distinct phases of work:

1. Spend + CPA are correlated - i.e. we’re unable to scale as we’re learning

2. We start to find some light winners that allow us to have bigger spend without a big shift in CPA (maintainers)

3. We then land on rocketship winners which allow us to keep CPA as is, but over triple our daily spend within a very short timeframe.

Now, with this in mind, let’s have a think about what this looks like month-to-month in practice.

Let’s create an example, let’s assume we have an account tracking £50k per month of spend with a £10k per month test budget.

We run 16 creative concept tests per month or £625 of media spend per cost of ad created.

Our gross profit margin on ad spend is 60% (the 2.5:1 LTV:CAC ratio).

Let’s assume we’ve got 42 ads currently live.

Our outcomes are:

• Loser –

  • 55% of the time

  • Profit = £625 x 60% = £375

• Maintainer -

  • 43% of the time

  • Joins the winning ad pool, and for simplicity gets 1/42th of the ad spend = £952/month.

  • Profit in month one = £952 x 60% = £571

  • Assume a lifespan of 2 months

  • Total profit = 2x £571 = £1,142 plus the initial test profit of £375

  • Total profit = £1,517

• Rocketship winners

  • 2% of the time

  • Allows us to increase monthly spend to £75k/month or £60k of hero spend, as we also increase test budget to maintain 20% of spend

  • This now has £1,429 / month of spend per ad (£60k/42 – again simplistic)

  • Lifespan of rocketships is longer, assume 4 months

  • Ongoing profit becomes 4x £857 = £3,428 + initial test of £375 =

  • Total profit = £3,803

  • But it also increases the budget of the entire system, which means we add £12k/month more uplift permanently.

  • That means over 12 months there’s a total of £144k additional profit in our system.

  • Total winner value is now £3,803 for the individual ad + £144k for the whole system =

  • £147,803 profit

What’s the Expected Value of this ad then?

Based purely in the media spend of £625 per ad the EV of an ad test is £3,814.

For those who are unfamiliar, Expected Value is a term borrowed from probability theory. Expected value is the average result you’d expect if you repeated a decision or bet many times — like the long-term payoff of a choice. It’s really big in poker as it helps you understand the different outcomes of results.

It’s something we use increasingly at Ballpoint to help make decisions where it might otherwise look quite tricky.

The cost of debate

Let’s assume some costs here:

• Startup founder:

  • 1x hours of time editing and giving feedback

  • £100k salary

  • Hourly rate of £77

  • 2.5 expected return on time

  • £192 of cost

• Startup Head of Growth

  • 1x hours of time

  • £90k salary

  • £70 hourly rate

  • £175 of cost

• Marketing manager

  • 1x hours of time

  • £50k salary

  • £39 hourly rate

  • £95 of cost

Those 3 people spending 1 hours on editing and feedback creates £462 of extra cost.

Assume 3 scenarios here:

• Scenario A is quick sign-off (maybe just 20minutes of sign off from all parties)

• Scenario B is long sign off = £462 of cost

• Scenario C is huge levels of cost = £1.3k cost

Our EV is £3.8k

Each scenario now nets:

• A = 4.73x return

• B = 3.08x return

• C = 1.3x return

Say the cost of creating and running all your ads for the month is £6k.

That now adjusts the returns to:

• A = 2.86x return

• B = 2.04x return

• C = 0.93x return

Now, the high level of debate means we’re losing money in the whole system – even if you achieve the same rate of success, you’re going to be losing money.

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How to increase our chance of success

But I hear you cry: “if we debate this for longer and increase the time spent on it, we’ll increase the chance of it winning.” This is true, if we doubled the rate of winner, the EV goes positive.

But this is where the issue falls down.

Rocketships are almost impossible to predict

This is where we have to come back to my list of knowns from above.

The experimentation process is very good at improving the ratio between fails and maintainers. I.e. it is good at refining our ‘what’s working’ ads that make up large volumes of day to day performance.

The gains made to probability of finding a rocketship winner however are much lower and harder to quantify. When we’re talking about 1 concept in 100 or 1 concept in 50 being a step changer, the sample sizes aren’t that good at really revealing if we’re able to improve that rate or if it’s just down to chance. (I.e. the actual rocketship probability is 1-5% as a range).

Rocketships are hard to predict. We’ve seen the following be rocketships:

• Ugly UGC mashups

• Straight UGC videos

• Post-it statics

• Review statics

• Heavily branded long form video

• BTS video

• Product shots

I.e. ads. We’ve seen all ad types have the chance of being rocketships.

And from a messaging perspective, we’ve seen rocketships be problem aware or solution aware or product aware. Again, there’s not a reliable framework for the rocketship.

With many of our clients we engage with some light touch “which ad you bet will win?” This is an exercise that almost always elicits losers. At the start its the “unexpected ads” and then people start betting against their gut and then the conventional ad might win the time after.

As I highlighted at the start, some of the best use of time that we’ve found is customer development. Hours spend talking to customers, consolidating that learning, and then having creative strategists play around with that research is the best activity we’ve found for increasing probability of finding maintainers and winners.

The ever-looming runway

In certain environments, I can see the logic for investing more time upfront. Not just in customer development, but also for what the ad visual looks like or how the branding is represented.

I am sure that there is a way to increase the 1-5% chance of finding rocketships to maybe 3-10%, and you can do that by investing more time upfront. The EV of a 10% chance of a rocketship certainly makes the time investment pay off.

But – there is the ever-looming runway.

In my experience the difference between the ‘just test it’ and the ‘let’s get this right’ teams is stark. Because if you’re the deterministic / let’s get this right team, then that will extend to your entire team philosophy. It won’t just be ads that this applies to but every part of how you run your startup.

The cultures that follow deterministic thinking end up taking weeks to make decisions on things like ads. There’s back and forth, then something else comes up. It gets passed on to someone else to edit and amend, delays happen, and so on.

Similarly, the probabilistic team cultures see that permeate the entire business. When things to become discussions and debates, there is usually a decision made quickly to test it. Maybe it’s not a perfect decision, but it’s good enough. And then the founders, the growth leads, the operational leads, whoever it is, move on to the next thing.

The cultures that follow probabilistic thinking end up taking minutes to make decisions on things like ads. Decisions are made, sign offs are quick, ads go live. The test is under way.

Rocketship winners are always needed to run successful businesses. In early days, they’re needed to find product channel fit – without your first rocketship, you’re stuck pushing out ads that don’t quite break even for you or make money for you.

Beyond those early days, it’s how you continually unlock new levels of scale. Most businesses won’t survive on £20k of ad spend a month as the returns won’t hit break-even in your P&L. You need to get to higher levels of ad spend.

Based on a 1-in-50 chance of finding a rocketship, if you can test 4 things per week, you’ll find a rocketship every 3 months.

Let’s imagine though that long debate increased your chance of success by a factor of 2 but at the expense of testing speed and you’re now only launching 4 concepts per month. Your time-to-rocketship is now 6 months. For many startups, by month 6, it will already be the beginning of game over. There’s just not that much runway to correct after this point.

Growing a company is one of the hardest things you can do.

Really killing it with ads is insanely hard. The system that drives ad growth is incredibly complex.

I’ve offered a highly simplified version of what’s at stake here. But I’ve done this to illustrate a way to think about testing over debating. There are lots of ways to run a business. Not every business is investor-backed. Not every business is operating on a model that requires continual growth or requires ads to create the entire sustainable business for them.

If you’ve got a highly successful other business unit (maybe wholesale or other offline dtc) then you can afford to take a different approach to thinking about growth.

But if I was to run a brand where digital DTC or ecom was likely to be the biggest growth lever, then I’d be operating on the probabilistic/test side as much as possible. In my experience, the faster you can get learning through the system, the better your overall outcome.

I write a weekly newsletter focused on startup growth. I currently run an agency where we manage over £15m of ad spend across some of the most exciting new companies around. Before I did this, I was a startup founder of my own brand Wine List, I was the first hire and head of growth at Thriva, and on a fractional based was the most senior growth lead at Hims UK, Fy! and Ferly.

Subjects that excite me: incrementality, customer psychology, measurement, technology.

If you were forwarded this maybe you’d like to read it every week! Give us a follow.

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🔗 When you’re ready, here’s how Ballpoint can help you

→ Profitably grow paid social spend from £30k/m → £300k/m

→ Create full funnel, jobs to be done-focused creative: Meta, TikTok, YouTube

→ Improve your conversion rate with landing pages and fully managed CRO

→ Maximise LTV through strategic retention and CRM - not just sending out your emails

Email me – or visit Ballpoint to find out more.

NB: We support brands spending above £20k/month.

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My background was in growth for DTC startups. I’d seen what acquiring 10,000s of customers looked like. I’d seen what failed experiments, cultures, and businesses looked like too. I should have been on good footing.

So what went wrong, and how would I do it differently again?

1. I made too many excuses for PMF

We never found product-market fit — I knew this, but I ignored it.

If there is one hill I will die on when talking to other early-stage founders it’s this one: stop making excuses for not having product-market fit.

Sean Ellis came up with a framework for PMF: ask your customers how disappointed they’d be if you disappeared. If 40% tell you they’d be very disappointed, the framework says you’ve got it. If it’s less than 40%, you don’t.

We ran this process with our entire customer base four times, and with a dozen cohorts on a monthly basis. We never got above 25%.

But I said, ‘we’re acquiring customers at X, once we hit scale, that would mean they are profitable after three months.’ (Excuse)

But I said, ‘our customers are typically older/British, how many of them would ever describe being ‘Very Disappointed’ that a company disappeared’? (Excuse)

But I said, if you look at this one cohort — we do have PMF. (Excuse)

I spent two years making excuses for not having PMF. But I knew deep down we didn’t have it.

How did I know?

2. I was terrified of turning off marketing

Every month I’d write an investor report and there would be some good stat in there. Either revenue or active subscribers were almost always going up. But I was terrified of turning off marketing.

I knew that if I did, churn would be around 20%. Revenue would drop in line.

I was terrified that even though our retention curve was flattening, it wasn’t flat. I was terrified because the margins never seemed to quite line up in practice as they did on paper.

Marketing hid many of these problems, and I was terrified every day of turning it off.

3. I acted like we had a future state of LTV/payback rather than today’s

Wine is an economies of scale business — and at low scale it has sucky margins. First six months, we had negative margins, next year was 10–15%, eventually we got to 35%.

“When we hit 5,000 customers,” I’d tell investors, “we will be able to push those margins to around 60%. And based on that, payback will be three months, and we’ll be at 3:1 LTV:CAC before the end of the year.”

Future states are important. It shows future viability of what scale means.

But I let myself think too much in the future state, and not enough in today’s.

In addition, lockdown meant 75% cheaper CPAs and about 30% better retention. Compound that with the future margin mindset, and today’s business burnt through cash way too quickly.

4. I fell in love with my first startup idea

I always thought of myself as an entrepreneur waiting for an idea. That’s a bad way to come up with startup ideas.

The process was: go through day-to-day life, wait for an idea to hit me, create a solution, experiment and validate, raise money, go.

“Ideas are worthless, execution is everything”

I’d often say this for years — and I retreat on it now. Ideas are important.

David Perell analysed the Simpsons writing process, and they said they rushed to the end of the first draft because they knew it wouldn’t be good. You need to flush out the crap, before you can get to the good stuff. Create an imperfect world, then improve it.

With Wine List, I found a problem and didn’t bother flushing out. I created the imperfect world, and ran with it from there.

Whatever business I start next, I’ll start with dozens of ideas, create success criteria up front, and test those ideas against them.

5. I fell in love with a solution — not a problem

“When I studied wine, my enjoyment of it went up by an order of magnitude,” began each pitch, “but the way I learnt was broken.”

I fell in love with the joy I felt having experienced a solution.

We always struggled to really communicate our problem-solution to our customers in an exciting way.

We found ourselves doing two jobs:

(1) teaching people why they should learn about wine, and

(2) why we would be the best way to learn

Matt Lerner told me years ago, he worries when he hears about startups ‘educating the market’.

In marketing, we know that attention is nanoseconds long. Grabbing it is difficult. Grabbing it and then telling that person they need to adapt their mental model to buy from you? That’s going to be almost impossible.

You see this in different ways: like shitty click-through rates and conversion rates below 1%.

And if you asked 100 wine drinkers ‘do you wish you knew more about wine?’ You’d find almost all of them would say yes. But if you asked if they would shift something in their life to learn, the number would go down a lot.

Sure, people wished they knew more about wine — but we never validated that problem. We validated a solution.

6. I lost my risk tolerance as soon as it became my money

In my life as a growth marketer, I almost always pushed for more budget and more risk.

“How much do you want to spend?” one boss once asked me, “how much do you want to grow?” I responded.

I had a very high risk tolerance.

But when it was my money, and I had to personally answer to my investors, that changed.

Being risk-averse in a startup is dangerous. It stops you making bigger bets like product changes or hiring new people.

I ended up optimising for runway rather than learning.

7. I lied to myself about what was needed to launch a new product

In September 2020, we tested a prototype of a 125ml-sample based ‘wine through the post’ product. It worked great. But we didn’t sell our first box of this until April 2021, why?

I told myself three lies around this product:

1. We need our own warehouse
2. We need to finish fundraising
3. We need to have a full time ops lead in place

We finished fundraising, and put an offer on a warehouse. We started hiring for the person to lead it, we met candidates, went back to the spec, and refined it.

Before we knew it, it was March. Six months after our first prototype and we still hadn’t built this product — or tested it with the market.

I took a holiday and realised that I didn’t need any of this. Getting this live was a series of tasks. I got back, and outsourced product design, logistics, and first build. Three weeks later, we had a product in market.

In May, we acquired over 1,000 customers to By The Glass at a £10 Facebook CPA. Our landing page for this converted at 6%, vs 0.8% for the core product.

I told myself three lies about launching this. I thought we needed conditions to be perfect.

Had we outsourced earlier, we could have had our first products out before Christmas 2020, and our future could have looked a lot different.

Bonus takeaways

Here’s a few final, smaller things which are worth pointing out.

i. Build recreational / celebrating time in with the team more

As a manager, I was great at building recreational time in with the team. As a founder, this slipped by the wayside.

And when I look back now, it’s not the day-to-day stuff that jumps out but the memories of our team together. The Christmas party, the time we went go-karting, the day we went around vineyards, and the warehouse party.

These things matter. They’re fun. The bonding that goes on with them helps cement relationships between colleagues that means when things are tough, they’re that little bit easier.

I wish I did these more, I wish I did them every month. Next time, I’m going to celebrate with the team more.

ii. No-code is great for MVPs, not so good for full products

“Product hacker is the new VP Engineering” was a post I was once going to write. I am glad I didn’t.

No-code is amazing. It means non-technical founders can build entire first products. But, we found as we were trying to build v2 of our site + product, it took just as long with no-code as not, and had far less capabilities.

iii. Continue to over-index on founder-investors

I had over 20 investors in our pre-seed. Half were founders or former founders. When Wine List closed down, one of them — Basubu founder, George Burgess, — called me up to say “well done, you’ve done it now, you’ve had a failed company, and you know it doesn’t matter.”

That was one of the best things I heard in those early days after announcing closure. He’s right. The fear of failure was always a hindrance — to what degree I don’t know, but fear of failure made me make worse decisions in many ways.

I optimised to ‘keep it going’ rather than make faster decisions that would have bigger impacts.

George was right, I’ve done it now, and I’m liberated from that fear again.

Those sorts of insights and feedback felt unique from the founder-investors. Other investors had value in different ways for sure, but the founder-investors were the ones I felt I could most easily turn to for help.

Thanks

I’d like to thank everyone for joining me on that journey. Thank you to the team old and new. Thank you to all of the investors who supported me every step along the way. Thank you to the customers and the community for joining us on it. And thank you to friends and family for putting up with having a founder as a partner, and friend.

For this article in particular, thank you to Matt H. Lerner, George Burgess, and Peter Sigrist for revisions, suggestions, and feedback.

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Growth insights from a former founder - Revue

Some final thoughts — edit
Sadly as part of this process, this business ended insolvent and as a result we owed a handful of producers and suppliers money. It’s the real downside to an end like this, and the part of the process that I personally feel most sad towards. If you liked any of the wines we sold, please go and support them by buying their wines wherever you can.