In partnership with

Hey guys! Over the past few months we’ve interviewed dozens of the world’s best growth-stage founders, and we’ve noticed a pattern: even the most successful entrepreneurs fall prey to similar blind spots. 

These aren't just minor oversights, but significant missteps that often determined the trajectory that their business took for the next few years, and were (often!) very expensive and time consuming to repair. 

Here we’re going to be referencing 3 founders we’ve interviewed: 

• Travis Pittman from TourRadar, the world’s largest organized adventure platform 

• Baris Ozaydinli from Scooch, UK’s leading pet health subscription platform 

• Thomas Njeru from Pula, Africa’s leading agri-insurtech player, across 22 countries and 2m farmers 

Let’s get into it! 

Blind spot #1: Solving the easy problems first

When entrepreneurs start building, they naturally gravitate toward problems they find the most interesting, or ones that they are best suited to solve, but many times those problems aren’t at the core of what they’re trying to achieve. 

Let’s explain with an example. 

Travis from TourRadar had a disastrous trip to Croatia where his group arrived with no transfer arrangements despite paying $5,000 upfront.

He and his brother learnt the numerous problems with tour bookings: lack of 24/7 support, trust issues with money transfers, and no chargeback capabilities.

Instead of tackling these directly, they built a social platform for tour operators. The results were predictably underwhelming… 

For TourRadar, this meant building a direct booking model where users would trust the platform enough to put down thousands of dollars for international travel.

Once they pivoted to this approach in 2013, the business took off like wildfire. They most recently raised a $50m series C backed by TCV. 

The Fix: Identify what the problem you’re solving is first, sounds obvious but founders often have a disconnect between the problem they want to solve and the solution they come up with.

Blind Spot #2: Unit economics? What’s that?

At the very start of any business, there’s enough to worry about. Start-up wisdom often leans on the fact that the business will lose money in any case for the first few years, so profitability isn’t what you need to think about on day 0. 

This problem is especially true for hyper-competitive industries, where “scale” (not us, being large) is where profitability starts to trickle in. 

Baris Ozaydinli had already been burnt making this mistake before at his previous venture, Fitwell (an AI-powered fitness coaching app): 

This experience made him hyper-focused on unit economics with Scooch from day one.

There were a few things they were solving for, not just building solid unit economics, but also being in a position where they could predict and manage cash flows really well. This obviously lead to them becoming a subscription business.

Travis from TourRadar similarly fell into the "grow at all costs" mentality prevalent in 2018-2019. 

One striking example was their addiction to providing discount codes, where they’d just give away 20% discounts on trips, because it worked well in one campaign.

They realised that the price elasticity for their user wasn’t actually that high, and taking away the 20% discount didn’t impact revenues at all… They were just giving away 20% of their bottom line for nothing. 

The Fix: Get an understanding of your unit economics from day 0. Questions to understand at scale and inception are: How much can we charge our user? How much does it cost to service them? How much can we acquire them for? Basic questions, but the assumptions you make to get to the answer will be the difference between Fitwell and success.

Blind Spot #3: Hiring too fast, too soon

All three founders emphasized that scaling too quickly - particularly in hiring - can be devastating.

Thomas Njeru of Pula described how after Series A funding, they had a gung-ho attitude towards getting more revenue in.

To get going, he hired a Chief Revenue Officer who quickly brought on 15 commercial people to start scaling up the sales efforts. However, this hire hadn’t worked in a position like this and didn’t realise the systems and processes that are needed prior to hiring a sales team.

As a result, most of them just ended up sitting around executing only what came along sporadically, or what the existing team had cobbled together. 

The Fix: Focus on timing. Stage-employee fit is everything. Not only do you need them at that stage, but are they the right type of employee for that point in the business? 

Here’s what that means for you

The journey from startup to scale-up inevitably involves mistakes. The difference between success and failure often comes down to how quickly founders recognize their blind spots and adjust course.

At the core of this is a simple idea: don’t lose the forest for the trees. You need to have a clear vision of what the business will look like in 5 yrs, or 10 yrs from today both from a product and financial perspective, and ask yourself: is everything I’m doing in service of that goal? 

 If not, it’s likely a mistake. 

Do you have experience with these or other founder blind spots? We'd love to hear from you. And if you're currently facing any of these challenges and would like to connect with other founders who've overcome them, reply to this email and we'll facilitate an introduction.

See you next week!

Rahul & Aryaman