Somewhere along the way, “lean” became a personality trait.
I get it. The era of lighting investor money on fire to chase growth is over, and good riddance. The founders who survived the last few years did it by being disciplined, running small teams, keeping burn rates low, and proving they could do more with less. Investors love this story. Your cap table loves this story. Your LinkedIn followers love this story.
But I’ve been working with early-stage founders for the last year, and I keep seeing the same pattern: founders who got so good at not spending money that they forgot how to invest in their own companies.
There's a difference between being lean and being cheap. And the scary part is that from inside the company, they look identical.
The founder who bootstrapped himself into a corner
I did fractional work for a founder last year who had built something genuinely impressive. He’d grown his product to around $500K in ARR almost entirely through word of mouth. Reddit posts, Slack communities, organic conversation. No paid marketing, no sales team, no outside funding. He was proud of that, and he should have been. Getting to half a million in revenue without spending a dollar on acquisition is a real accomplishment.
But by the time I got involved, the growth curve had gone flat.
Net revenue retention was declining. The product served a tight niche, and existing customers had already expanded into every feature he’d built. There wasn’t much left to upsell them on. New sign-ups had slowed to a trickle, which meant that every time a customer churned, there weren’t enough new ones coming in to fill the gap. The bucket had a hole in it, and instead of patching the hole or finding a bigger hose, he was just watching the water level drop and telling himself it would stabilize.
How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.
I looked at the numbers and told him he needed to invest in marketing. Not a Super Bowl ad. A fractional marketing consultant who could build a pipeline and test some channels. I brought him four people. All of them had done this successfully at companies of a similar size. All of them were within his budget.
He found a reason to reject every single one.
