Three founder types emerge repeatedly: the Maker obsessed with product variety but weak on revenue per SKU, the Digital Marketer who masters customer acquisition but struggles beyond that, and the Business Owner focused on ROI and investment decisions. Each has different blind spots and needs different metrics to fix them.
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It's a good question, and I have a couple of different frameworks to think about or, or ways to answer that. Before I get to those two or maybe three frameworks, I just want to circle back on the point you made about founders being marketers because the profile that you described, I would say, is one of the founder archetypes that I see, but there are a couple of others. And these are worth mentioning because they tend to behave quite differently and have different types of issues and problems in the business. So type 1, I call the maker or creator. They're usually a designer. They might be a subject matter expert. I had a founder at one point last year who was like a herbalist and nutritionist and she had this supplement brand. And what I commonly see with those types of founders is that they have way too many SKUs because they just love making products and they overdesign, they overmake, and they perpetually think that the answer to solving their revenue problems is, oh, I need more stuff, right? The reason I don't have sales is because I don't have enough SKUs. Yes. And I mean, you, you would empathize with this, like the more SKUs you make, like the more complicated your supply chain becomes and, you know, the more money you have tied up in, in inventory. So with founders like that, I'm often on the lookout for a revenue a new per SKU metric. So I want to understand like how much revenue or profit are they actually generating relative to the size of the catalog. And usually it's a disappointingly low number. So that's profile 1. Uh, profile 2 is what you described, which is the digital marketer or customer acquisition guru. These people understand often, you know, the Meta, the Google platforms, understand CAC and LTVs and Very often if they are comfortable with the CAC and LTV economics and they can see that their marketing is profitable, then they're usually pretty content just having a bookkeeper or finance person kind of following them around and cleaning up their mess, so to speak. The third archetype that I come across is what I call the business owner archetype. They're not necessarily an expert in any one discipline or domain. Um, in my experience, they're often a little bit more seasoned. They've usually, you know, been around the block a few times, and they're much more inclined to, you know, want to talk about or, you know, think about things like ROI and is this a good or bad investment. And they're tend
