The Rise of the Growth Founder
15 years after Growth Hacking
Thank you Brian Balfour, Lindy Drope, Sean Ellis, Tiago Forte, Nikunj Kothari, Max Marchione, Lenny Rachitsky, Ben Shanken, Jessi Craige Shikman for draft input, and Hannah Ahn for visuals.
15 years ago, Growth as a function and career barely existed.
Facebook pioneered one of the earliest growth teams in the late 2000s. Chamath Palihapitiya and the growth team he led from 2007 to 2011 solidified a repeatable approach to acquiring users and having them rapidly and repeatedly experience core value.
Facebook grew from 50 million users to over 500 million in this time.
Growth professionals spread across Silicon Valley, and growth teams sprung up all over tech.
The discipline gained further credibility in the 2010s:
Sean Ellis — entrepreneur, author, growth leader at companies like Dropbox and LogMeIn — popularized the term Growth Hacker in 2010.
Andrew Chen — investor, a16z partner, ex-Uber — emphasized growth’s importance with Growth Hacker is the New VP Marketing in 2012.
Brian Balfour — Reforge CEO and ex-HubSpot VP Growth — helped solidify Growth vs. Marketing vs. Product in 2014.
Hastening the zeitgeist, Paul Graham’s 2012 essay Startup = Growth articulated the very definition of a startup as a company that is able to achieve sustained and rapid growth.
In the last 10 years, growth roles have exploded.
Growth Hackers grew into Growth Marketers and Growth Product Managers.
Who became Heads of Growth, Growth VPs, and Chief Growth Officers.
Who hired Growth Engineers, Growth Designers, Growth Data Scientists, Growth Product Marketing Managers, and more.
There’s a multitude of resources on running growth teams of various shapes and sizes. But there’s a huge gap in clarity on the most foundational growth role.
That role is the Growth Founder.
The Growth Founder
I see more and more startups, both whom I advise and beyond, with a specific Founder or Founding Teammate whose sole focus is growth.
These individuals typically cut their teeth in growth or go to market in the last 15 years. They studied the startups, models, and materials our growth forebears created.
They often co-exist with a Product Founder, splitting key responsibilities. They are rarely the Technical Founder.
That said, the majority case is still the classical one: a CEO, usually lacking a formal growth background, who owns growth by default. I hear these CEOs ask if they should hire a Head of Growth.
Given the depth of responsibility required to drive early stage growth — explored below — a better answer is for that CEO to learn to be a strong Growth Founder.
Wild West to Day Zero
The very concept of a Growth Founder is somewhat controversial.
Conventional wisdom suggests that growth comes after product-market fit. Therefore growth roles are traditionally only prioritized meaningfully after company inception.
It is still true that startups should prioritize product-market fit ahead of scaling. So why are startups staffing growth at inception?
Three trends are driving this phenomenon:
“Growth” is now widely understood. What was once a Wild West for rogue hackers is now well-defined. A startup’s entire growth strategy can be articulated, critiqued, and improved before a single line of code is written.
It’s easier than ever before to analyze and understand data. Growth skills like data feedback loops can speed up everything — even the elusive search for product-market fit.
Most dramatically, AI lets us build orders of magnitude faster. Prototypes can be built in hours, and increasingly, in minutes. The right idea can reach product-market fit in months or weeks. I increasingly see startups hit $1M+ ARR in weeks, $10M ARR in <1 year (1, 2, 3).
Growth is increasingly becoming a day zero priority.
Whatever It Takes
I hear Growth Founders — CEO or otherwise — ask, “So what should I focus on?”.
The answer is deceptively simple: whatever it takes to drive company growth.
The operative phrase is “whatever it takes”.
While this definition is similar to the original definition of the Growth Hacker1, the Growth Founder’s responsibility runs far deeper: early stage growth requires tackling a huge variety of problems.
To identify which problems, Growth Founders can use theory of constraints.
Theory of Constraints
The Growth Founder must internalize that their startup is a system, and at any point in time, this system has a binding constraint slowing it down.
Theory of constraints is an idea borrowed from manufacturing2:
The theory of constraints views any manageable system as limited by at least one constraint.
Only by increasing flow through the constraint can overall throughput be increased.
It’s the Growth Founder’s job to get under the skin of that constraint — no matter where it exists — and fix it. The Growth Founder is a Swiss Army Knife, solving a variety of problems blocking growth. And theory of constraints provides a repeatable framework for identifying where to focus.
What constraints should the Growth Founder focus on?
In order:
🧠 Growth Strategy
⚡️ Shipping Velocity
💜 Customer Retention
📣 Customer Acquisition
🧠 Growth Strategy
The Growth Founder should make sure the following fundamental strategy questions are answered as early as possible in the startup’s life:
Product
Who is our customer?
What problem do we solve?
What value do we create?
Revenue
What is our business model?
Who is our buyer?
How much do we charge?
Market
How do we position?
Why us versus competition?
Where will we find early customers?
A lack of well-reasoned answers to these questions results in the team building the wrong thing — the first major blocker to growth.
But wait: aren’t these questions the product owner’s responsibility?
Two approaches are viable:
The Growth Founder as subject matter expert. In this capacity, there are specific areas where the Growth Founder has deep expertise, such as determining an initial pricing and packaging, or finding early customers.
The Growth Founder as a check-and-balance. In this role, they don’t need to have all the answers themselves. Instead they ensure that answers are rapidly reached.
Answering these questions does not mean committing forever. It means reaching a working hypothesis, to be revisited later.
With these questions answered, the next constraint is usually shipping velocity.
⚡️ Shipping Velocity
Most startups experience a growth constraint in how fast they ship.
A key tell is if a startup holds back growth because “the product isn’t ready yet”. Another is constantly informing customers that their top requests are “on the roadmap”.
Technical Founders own shipping velocity. But they also need to be heads-down building. How much should they deviate from actually building to speed up production?
This is where the Growth Founder can add surprising firepower — in four flavors.
Creating Capacity
Often, the biggest impediment to shipping velocity is not enough people.
The Growth Founder can dramatically accelerate hiring engineers, designers, and whoever else is needed to ship.
Consider that hiring requires most of the same tools and techniques as Growth.
You have to brand and market the company. There is a candidate funnel and conversion rates. And then you must sell to close.
The Growth Founder has skills uniquely suited to boosting hiring. This avoids the common pitfall of the Technical Founder spending precious time marketing the company, when they could be focused on vetting the most promising candidates, and building.
Validating Direction
Velocity is speed as well as direction.
Building on initial strategy, the Growth Founder can provide much-needed confirmation that the team is moving in the correct direction.
This is primarily a question of acquiring a small and steady stream of early customers, then tracking and sharing their needs. In addition, monitoring competition and industry trends helps keep the team pointed in the right direction.
Driving Efficiency
Growth Founders are usually systems-thinkers, semi-technical, and data-savvy. These skills perfectly predispose them to hacking together no- and low-code solutions to drive efficiency.
These typically use tools like IFTTT and Zapier to automate routine workflows like bug capture or issue resolution (“Just close the Linear issue, and an automation magically notifies all customers”). And we’re living through a rapid shift towards AI Agents like Lindy, Gumloop, and others.
Direct Contribution
The same no- and low-code approach can also be directly applied to the customer experience.
Examples mostly relate to non-product building blocks, like a customer data platform, marketing automation tool, email preference center, and so on. Standing these up frees up engineering to work on harder challenges, improving overall shipping velocity.
Once a startup’s strategy is clear and it is shipping fast, it reaches the more typical growth constraint of retention.
💜 Customer Retention
The Growth Founder should make it their priority to drive excellent retention3, and I recommend Growth Founders focus on retention before acquisition. The reason is to ensure that you don’t have a leaky funnel ahead of reaching dramatically more customers4.
Driving retention usually breaks down into two themes:
Evolving the product to be as sticky as possible — one that creates greater value, has network effects, naturally pulls users back, and more.
Standing up functions that directly boost retention, such as Support, Success, Onboarding, Lifecycle Marketing, Product Marketing, and beyond.
The key is to tackle the former category of high-risk strategy problems before the latter category of missing execution. The former category likely unlocks more meaningful step changes than the latter, though both are usually necessary.
When retention is excellent, acquisition will likely be the biggest constraint.
📣 Customer Acquisition
We finally reach the constraint that most people consider to be ‘growth’. This might be a startup’s binding constraint for many years.
To tackle this constraint, the Growth Founder will likely own one or both of Marketing and Sales.
Within both, theory of constraints is a general framework to identify what needs attention. For example:
Sales: You might have no trouble booking demos, but if you aren’t closing, you need to focus on bottom of funnel.
Marketing: Your checkout page may have astonishing conversion, but if it barely receives traffic, you need to drive top of funnel.
Slowly but surely, focus will shift from removing constraints, to finding repeatable and sustainable sources of growth.
Traversing Constraints
Moving Forwards
A common question is “when should I move on from a given constraint?”.
The purest answer is “when the ROI elsewhere is higher”. A simpler answer lies in understanding how you compare to industry benchmarks within each constraint.
If your competitor ships ten times faster, or retains customers twice as well, you have room to improve — and you probably shouldn’t move on from that constraint.
Moving Backwards
A closely related question to the above is: do I ever need to go back to a previous constraint? The answer is simple: if it has become a binding constraint again, then yes.
Order of Operations
In case not obvious, it’s crucial to consider sequencing. Tackling a constraint out of order results in wasted work. The most common pitfall is focusing on acquisition too early,, but beware of other order of operation mistakes.
From Constraints to Teams
We’ve talked about the Growth Founder’s role in relentlessly and methodically removing constraints.
Another conceptualization is to consider the functions the Growth Founder helps 0→1:
These teams stop the pipeline from collapsing back in on itself, resurrecting the constraint that initially existed.
The Growth Founder shouldn’t attempt to master each area. Instead, they should get good enough, then automate or hire in excellence, and move on. Since this involves scaling new areas every 3-6 months, it’s important to develop a framework for getting good at new things — typically curating a roster of peers, mentors, and high quality content.
Who eventually leads those teams?
In some cases, the Growth Founder takes that responsibility. Either as CEO, or a leadership role like COO, President, or GM.
But more commonly, Growth Founders hate this. Leading these functions at scale is completely different to when a startup is tiny. And successful Growth Founders are usually architects, not scalers.
For this reason, I recommend the Growth Founder hands over as much as possible, as quickly as possible. This creates space to step back and evaluate what is needed for the next wave of growth — unencumbered by the rigmarole of running the day-to-day.
And crucially, this creates space to identify and focus on the areas that individual enjoys the most.
Further reading:
Why Founders Should Lead Growth (Before Hiring) — Sean Ellis
You’re Not Ready for a Head of Growth: Run This Founder-Led Growth Playbook Instead — Matt Lerner
“A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.” (source)
To go deep on the Theory of Constraints, read Tiago Forte’s 11-part masterclass on the topic.
For a more detailed definition of excellent retention, read this excellent benchmark round-up from Lenny Rachitsky.
Two exceptions to the recommendation of focusing on retention before acquisition:
When you need customers to validate your ability to retain. You must put some water in the bucket to check it for leaks.
When your competition is so fierce that it makes sense for you to drive acquisition at the expense of focusing on retention, because if you don’t, you’ll irreversibly lose out on market share. This approach is high-risk and high-reward. It demands that you corner the market before your competitors do, and then rapidly address your inevitable churn issues.
Gaurav, this is a sharp reframing of growth. The idea of the Growth Founder as a constraint-breaker really landed with me.
It’s not just about tactics, it’s about how leadership shows up in the system itself. Nice.
OOT but visualization is on point! what software do you use?