Closing 2024, part 1 of 2

In partnership with

Hey everyone!

As we approach the end of the year, we wanted to use these last 2 editions to recap what we know now that we didn’t in July when we started Scale. We hope you find this useful if you are / thinking of building something, or you just find it interesting nonetheless 🙂 

Before we start, here’s where to go if you’re looking for our products (like Momentum) or if you’d be interested in sponsoring Scale.

🔍 Lived experiences FTW

It’s clear that the strongest founders in the world weren't just chasing waves – they were solving problems they'd personally experienced or witnessed up close. As a result they had a far deeper understanding of the problem, the market, what solutions will / won’t work, i.e. they had extremely strong founder-market fit.

🎯 Don’t be afraid to pivot

The path to product-market fit rarely follows a straight line. The most successful founders were willing to accept that the product they had built didn’t work, and it was time to pivot.

🧩 Hire for potential over experience 

In new markets, direct experience is often impossible to find. The best founders looked for people who could grow with the company rather than those who'd "done it before." While this seems obvious - it’s often difficult to actually put to practice when testing candidates in interviews. We saw several different approaches:

🌱 Be clear on your culture from day-1 and protect it fiercely 

Culture isn't just about values on a wall – it's about creating clear expectations and frameworks for decision-making. Almost every founder that we featured was clear on one thing - there’s no working around a culture-employee mismatch.

💰 Your investors should bring a lot more than capital 

The best founders saw investors as extensions of their team, each bringing specific expertise or capabilities. Be careful if the only value your investors can bring to the table is capital.

🤝 VC is not the only game in town 

The traditional VC path isn't right for everyone. Many successful founders combined different funding approaches from bootstrapping to venture debt to optimize for their specific needs. Don’t chase the typical VC path if it doesn’t really fit your needs.

🎯Loves your product + no purchasing power = $0 revenue

Go-to-market is tricky, especially when selling into bigger organisations. There’s dozens of potential “entry points” for your salespeople but it’s very difficult to identify which ones works best. Not only that, once you’re in, you might not be making your pitch to the person who finally decides whether to purchase your product or not. Here’s how founders tackle this:

Building a newsletter is hard

One of our biggest (and most personal) learnings of the year is that building a newsletter is difficult. There are now 2,500 of you reading our founder stories every week, and honestly, that blows our minds.

When we started Scale, we had a simple goal: share the real, unvarnished stories of founders building incredible companies. We're particularly grateful to all the founders and investors who've trusted us with their stories - the victories, the struggles, and everything in between.

Once again - we can’t thank you enough. Enjoy the holidays, and as always let us know what you think of this edition below:

P.S. If you found this valuable, please share it with fellow founders and operators. Have stories or insights to share? Reach out at [email protected]