Jason M. Lemkin says early-stage startups build great products but skip sales and marketing, then struggle. You need someone driving demand generation and converting it to revenue. Under-investing here kills growth unless you're purely organic, which almost never happens.
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And not just because I'm on this podcast, that's what I, that's where I usually observe it. And I'll give you a couple reasons why I see it that way. You usually expect your, your heads down, especially like early days, your heads down building an incredible product, which you should be doing. But at some point you need to get it out there to the world, right? And you need to drive, like you said, top of the funnel, you need to drive some level of demand, right? And you need to close that demand into dollars. What I see happen is you expect big things, but you underinvest in like the sales and marketing side. So it doesn't mean you need to go crazy, right? But sometimes if you don't have somebody who's capable of a demand gen person to drive demand, right? You're, you're going to struggle in driving demand, right? Unless it's a purely organic business, which is quite frankly is extremely rare these days. So that's one thing that I'd call out.