Entrepreneurs who are just getting started often spend too much time figuring out their offering (product, pricing, etc.) and not enough time figuring out their marketing strategy. Some of my most popular pieces reflect this (How to Scale to $1mm and How We Found Our First 30 Clients).

Because marketing is an afterthought, the only go-to-market work these founders do is to set up a landing page and some cold email sequences. So, their first clients all come in through cold outreach. Clients won through cold outreach tend to be the most price-sensitive, fastest to churn, and toughest to please, so the entrepreneur spends all their time servicing these clients instead of building sustainable, inbound marketing channels.

And despite what gurus tell you, cold outreach doesn’t scale well.

If you don’t have extremely specific personas, great messaging, supporting collateral, or good client disqualification methods, most of your outreach will be wasted and contribute to poor deliverability scores. So again, the entrepreneur is stuck on a hedonic treadmill, trying to find new prospects, offering pricing discounts to win business, and neglecting long-term marketing assets.