Should you hire a growth marketer yet?
hiring a growth person before you have something to grow is one of the most expensive mistakes available at seed stage. six questions, an honest answer, and it will sometimes tell you not to hire anyone including me.
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Why the order matters
product, then users, then retention, then budget, then channel, then headcount. skipping ahead is what makes growth hires fail, and the failure usually gets blamed on the hire rather than the timing.
the most common version is hiring someone to find a channel and then judging them on scale. those are different jobs with different timelines, and expecting both from one person in one quarter is how good marketers get fired for someone else\u2019s planning.
The honest cases for waiting
if retention is unmeasured, every pound of acquisition is a guess. if the budget is under a few thousand a month, a specialist cannot generate enough return to cover themselves. if the product is unfinished, growth simply exposes that faster.
none of those are fixed by hiring. they are fixed first, and then hiring works.
Numbers tell you what. They do not tell you what to do.
bring your real numbers to the breakdown call and leave with a plan for them. free, no pitch deck.
Common questions
What if the score says wait but we are under pressure to grow?
pressure to grow does not create readiness. the usual right move is a short engagement to find and prove a channel, then hire against the thing that works. that is faster than a hire who spends their first quarter working out where to start.
Does this apply to agencies too?
mostly yes. an agency needs the same preconditions, and adds account management between you and the work. below roughly $10,000 a month in spend you are usually paying for coordination rather than execution.
Other scale tools
Retention curve projector
put in D1, D7 and D30 retention and your install rate, and see where your active users flatten out.
ScaleChurn to customer lifetime
convert monthly churn into how long an average customer stays, how many survive a year, and what cutting churn is worth.
ScaleFree trial to paid
work out revenue from trial starts, and the real cost of acquiring a paying customer once you account for trials that never convert.
ScaleK-factor calculator
work out your viral coefficient from invites sent and accepted, and see how many extra users each new user really brings.
Bring one real growth problem. Leave with the fix.
the breakdown call is free. no pitch deck, no agency handoff.