The primary goal of a Silicon Valley-style start-up is cost-efficient growth.

However, a big mistake that many founders and operators make is that they try to buy growth by building more and more new features.

This is the most expensive way to acquire new users and customers.

Why?

It costs thousands or millions of dollars of engineering, product, and design investment - and it rarely works.

Why?

Many startups fail to do the cheapest and most effective thing to acquire new users first. Putting the thing they’ve already built in front of people at scale!

Incredible home page messaging, self-serve funnels, ads, webinars, conferences, viral loops - whatever it takes to SELL the thing you’ve already got.

Don’t fall into the trap of trying to acquire more users by imagining that the next feature will crack the code on growth.

This gets especially bad when companies try to brute force growth by selling to ANY enterprise customer who will buy SOMETHING from them. Then, the new feature ideas become contractual obligations.

Use targeted and effective marketing to sell the thing you’ve already built to people who want to buy it "as is."