Eric Siu argues that scaling too fast, especially spreading marketing across too many channels at once, kills startups. Focus on one channel until you get traction, then diversify. Premature scaling ranks second only to funding problems as a cause of failure.
What do you think the number one killer is for startups? Funding. Not enough funding. That's number 2, I believe. Number one is premature scaling. And oftentimes premature scaling also means premature marketing. A lot of it goes into marketing, right? To be more specific, it's premature marketing diversification that's a killer. When you try to do too many channels, you try to do 10 or 15 different things at once, you're going to end up doing nothing because you never really got good at one and then try to diversify. So the best thing to do is try to do one first before you try to do all these different things, because you're going to diversify the focus of your team and your resources and you don't have a lot in the beginning. And that's what's going to lead to you getting no traction. On anything.
