You’re Not Ready for a Head of Growth: Run This Founder-Led Growth Playbook Instead

vector research partners ( aka V4RP )

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You’re Not Ready for a Head of Growth: Run This Founder-Led Growth Playbook Instead

Founders are the ones who figure out how their business grows. Use these tactics — built specifically for founders — to uncover your highest-leverage growth opportunities.

Why “Founder-Led Growth” Matters

Startups fail for plenty of reasons — no product-market fit, co-founder drama, poor ops. But growth expert Matt Lerner (ex-PayPal B2B growth lead, co-founder of SYSTM) sees a less obvious killer: the founder’s approach to growth.

Through years advising hundreds of startups, Lerner has honed a framework called founder-led growth. It’s about founders getting hands-on in growth channels instead of outsourcing early. While most founders dive into sales or product themselves, growth often becomes a “hire later” task. That’s a mistake.

“Founders need to be the ones figuring out how their business grows,” Lerner says. “The best founders dive in, make a mess, and learn fast.”

Founder-led growth isn’t just a concept — it’s a repeatable process. Lerner’s work, from his language-market fit guide to Growth Levers and How to Find Them, is all about translating that process into actionable frameworks for early-stage teams.

Common Traps That Kill Growth Early

Before diving into tactics, Lerner points out three ways founders sabotage themselves:

1. Overthinkers – They debate, theorize, and strategize endlessly, but never execute.
2. Underthinkers – They build a lot without validating, adding complexity and slowing themselves down.
3. Hire-and-Delegaters – They outsource too early, relying on outsiders who lack the full company context.

All three roles matter at scale, but early-stage startups need humble, curious, experimental founders first. Strategy, hiring, and delegation are slow ways to learn — learning quickly is what matters at the 0→1 stage.

Step 1: Find Your Growth Levers

A growth lever is a single, high-impact tactic that moves the needle. Think 10% of work delivering 90% of results.

Lerner’s three-step framework:

1. Map the customer journey – Identify drop-offs, friction points, and bottlenecks.
2. Understand customer motivations – Run interviews to learn the “why” behind behavior.
3. Run rapid experiments – Test ideas fast, learn, and iterate.

Example: UK photobook app Popsa had a low install rate despite ranking #1 in the App Store. One tweak — changing “Fast, Easy Photo Books” → “Photo Books in Five Minutes” — quadrupled installs overnight. The lever was tiny, but the impact huge.

Key takeaway: start with your North Star metric, map customer behavior, identify bottlenecks, and test solutions quickly.

Step 2: Understand Your Customers

Metrics tell you what is happening, not why. That’s where interviews come in.

Lerner recommends a Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) approach:

• Ask what the customer bought and what it enables them to achieve.
• Probe deeper: Why is that goal important? Who else cares?
• Map behavior: Where did they look? Who did they ask? What alternatives did they consider?

Patterns emerge after a few interviews, and suddenly your growth experiments have direction.

Step 3: Run Rapid Growth Experiments

Think “Agile for growth,” but faster. One-week sprints, focused on learning, not just execution.

Lerner’s structure:

1. Document experiments – Observation, hypothesis, predicted outcomes.
2. Run, analyze, iterate – Track results, understand surprises, refine approach.
3. Focus on bottlenecks – Only tackle 1–3 at a time for maximum impact.
4. Stay flexible – Pivot quickly based on findings.

Examples:

• Sonic Jobs: Generic emails → links to specific job types. Activation doubled.
• Smart Tales: Marketing copy updated to highlight value parents actually cared about → paywall conversion +65%.

Growth experiments are like debugging code: isolate variables, test fast, learn faster.

Advanced Tips

• Focus on shared outcomes: If multiple experiments fail, go back to customer interviews. Find patterns in why people bought your product.
• Levers don’t need to be novel: Borrow tactics from analogous industries. Calm’s onboarding flow has inspired SaaS companies. Copy smart, adapt smarter.
• Embed growth in everyone’s job: Share the North Star, link everyone’s work to it, and make quarterly goals actionable.

When to Hire

A Head of Growth comes later. First, make sure you can answer:

1. What’s our first growth lever?
2. How will we pull it?
3. How can we reliably acquire customers if we double down?

Early hires are often:

• Junior Generalists: Analytical thinkers, bias for action, adaptable.
• Internal Co-Pilots: Team members already engaged in experiments, learning on the job.

Scale hiring only after you’ve found repeatable growth levers.

The Bottom Line

Founder-led growth isn’t optional. It’s how you:

• Learn faster than competitors.
• Identify high-leverage opportunities.
• Build a growth culture before hiring a team.

“You wouldn’t hire a Head of Product before building your first product. Why hire someone to figure out growth if you haven’t?” — Lerner

Growth is a founder’s job — and doing it yourself first gives insights you can’t delegate.

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