Most founders wait too long to invest in marketing—and by the time they realize their mistake, they've already lost the race.
That’s why Paul Veugen challenges the conventional wisdom that marketing should wait until product-market fit, arguing that building your growth engine from day one is the only way to achieve predictable, scalable growth.
Paul Veugen is a serial entrepreneur and investor currently building Detail, a video creation platform that enables everyone to share their story faster. He previously founded and led Human to an acquisition by Mapbox, and Usabilla which sold to SurveyMonkey for $100 million in 2019. He also led product and go-to-market at Color, which has raised close to $500 million from top-tier investors.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
02:01 - Why "don't invest in marketing until product-market fit" is terrible advice for founders
03:37 - How marketing experiments are actually customer discovery in disguise
07:26 - Why cold outbound is dead and founders need to build momentum before reaching out
13:27 - The brutal math: You need 20% month-over-month growth to hit $1M ARR in 12 months
19:05 - How to brute force your way to finding winning marketing channels
26:05 - Why marketing channels take 90+ days to show results (and most founders give up too soon)
34:13 - Overcoming the fear of looking stupid in public when building in public
40:58 - How positioning drives product decisions, not the other way around
47:44 - Why AI features are attention grabbers, not value drivers
49:18 - The messy middle: Why channels feel broken before they explode
55:05 - How being an investor makes you a better founder (and vice versa)
57:58 - The problem with MVPs and why testing individual ingredients is useless
01:02:23 - Why building a startup is an endless expedition, not a sprint