The Founder's Dilemma: Focusing on Product vs. Driving Growth

You’re a founder. You live and breathe your product. You spent months, maybe years, obsessing over every line of code, every pixel of the UI, and the elegant solution you’ve built for a painful problem. The temptation is to keep building, to add that one more feature, to polish that last rough edge. You believe in the Silicon Valley mantra: “Build it and they will come.”

I’m here to tell you that’s a dangerous myth.

I’ve seen it dozens of times. Brilliant technical founders with world-class products that go nowhere. Why? Because a product without distribution is just a well-crafted hobby. The real challenge isn't just building a great product; it's getting that product into the hands of people who will pay for it. This is the founder's dilemma: the constant tug-of-war between perfecting the product and driving growth.

This isn't another article telling you to “just do marketing.” This is a playbook for technical founders on how to think about, structure, and execute on growth without sacrificing your product's soul. We’re going to break down how to balance this conflict at every stage of your early journey.

Why "Build It and They Will Come" Is a Myth in B2B SaaS

The idea that a superior product will win on its own merit is romantic, but it’s a relic from a time when markets weren’t so saturated. Today, your potential customers are drowning in noise. For every problem, there are at least five well-funded startups, three legacy incumbents, and a dozen open-source projects all vying for attention.

In B2B, the stakes are higher. A purchase isn't a $10 app download; it's a strategic decision that can impact someone's job, their team's workflow, and their company's bottom line. The B2B buyer's journey is long and complex. It involves discovery, research, comparison, demos, security reviews, and multiple stakeholders. Trust isn't given; it's earned. And you don't earn trust by hiding in your code editor.

Think of your startup as a bucket. Your product's quality and ability to retain users determine how leaky that bucket is. Growth is the water you pour into it. If you focus only on perfecting the bucket (product), you'll have a beautiful, watertight bucket with nothing in it. It’s useless. Conversely, if you pour a firehose of water (growth) into a very leaky bucket, you’ll lose most of it, but you’ll learn exactly where the leaks are. You get data. You get feedback. You get a chance to iterate.

In the early days, you need both. You need to be plugging the biggest leaks while ensuring a steady stream of water is coming in.

The Product-Led Growth (PLG) Fallacy

For many technical founders, Product-Led Growth (PLG) sounds like the perfect answer. It puts the product at the center of the universe, which is where you're most comfortable. “The product will sell itself!” It feels like a way to do marketing without actually doing marketing.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what PLG is.

What PLG Actually Is (and Isn't)

PLG isn’t just slapping a free trial on your SaaS. It is a comprehensive go-to-market strategy where the product is the primary vehicle for acquisition, conversion, retention, and expansion. Companies like Slack, Calendly, and Figma are the poster children. Their products are inherently viral. Using Calendly creates more Calendly users. Inviting a colleague to a Figma file creates a new user.

PLG is not a passive strategy. It requires an immense, continuous investment in engineering and product design to reduce friction to zero, create viral loops, and deliver value before the paywall. It's a product strategy, but it’s also a growth strategy.

The Hidden "G" in PLG: Growth Marketing

Here’s the part that gets ignored: even the most successful PLG companies have massive marketing machines working in the background. Slack didn't just appear. They invested heavily in PR and content marketing for years before their launch to build an audience. Figma runs sophisticated performance marketing campaigns and has a world-class content and SEO strategy.

PLG gets users to sign up and convert, but you still need to make them aware you exist in the first place. That top-of-funnel (TOFU) motion—getting people to your website to even see the “Sign Up Free” button—is pure marketing. It's SEO, content, paid ads, social media, and community building. PLG doesn't replace marketing; it changes its focus from generating leads for sales to generating sign-ups for the product.

So, don't hide behind PLG as an excuse not to do marketing. It's a powerful model, but it still requires a deliberate, focused effort to drive growth.

A Practical Framework for Balancing Product and Growth

The balance between product and growth isn’t a static 50/50 split. It's a dynamic ratio that evolves as your company matures. Here’s a phased approach to get it right.

Phase 1: Pre-Launch to First 10 Customers (The "Do Things That Don't Scale" Era)

At this stage, your goal is validation, not scale.

• Product Focus (80%): Build the absolute minimum viable product (MVP) that solves one critical problem for one specific Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Resist the urge to add features. Your product is a hypothesis, and your goal is to test it as quickly as possible. Every line of code should be in service of answering the question: “Will someone find this so valuable they will pay for it?”

• Growth Focus (20%): This isn't marketing; it's customer development. Your “growth” activities are 100% manual and unscalable. Identify 50 people who fit your ICP on LinkedIn. Send them personalized messages—not to sell, but to learn. Say, “I’m building a tool for [role] to solve [problem]. I see you’re a [role]. Would you be open to a 15-minute chat to give me feedback on my approach?” Get on calls. Listen. Build a waitlist. Write two or three foundational blog posts about the problem you solve, not your product. Share them in relevant communities to get feedback. Your goal is to find 10 people who are willing to use your clunky, buggy MVP and give you brutal, honest feedback.

Phase 2: First 10 to 100 Customers (Finding Product-Market Fit)

Now you have some signal. Your goal is to find a repeatable pattern.

• Product Focus (60%): You are now in a tight feedback loop with your first 10-20 users. Talk to them constantly. What do they love? What’s confusing? What’s missing? Your product roadmap should be almost entirely dictated by their feedback. Fix bugs, streamline onboarding, and build the one or two features that they consistently say would be game-changing. You are hardening the core product and plugging the biggest leaks in your bucket.

• Growth Focus (40%): It's time to build your first real, repeatable acquisition channel. Do not try to do everything. Pick one channel based on where your ICP lives and commit to it for at least six months.

  • Option A: Content & SEO. If your ICP actively researches their problems on Google, start a blog. Don't write about your features. Write about their pain points. Create definitive, 2000-word guides that are better than anything else on the internet for your niche. For example, if you sell a logging tool for developers, write “The Ultimate Guide to Kubernetes Logging in 2024.”

  • Option B: Targeted Outreach. If your ICP is a specific role in a specific industry (e.g., VPs of Finance at mid-market tech companies), a systematic outreach process on LinkedIn or via email can work. This isn't spam. It's targeted, personalized, and value-driven communication.

  • Option C: Community. If your ICP gathers in specific Slack groups, subreddits, or forums, become an incredibly valuable member of that community. Answer questions, offer help, and share your expertise daily. Don't pitch your product. Become the go-to expert on the topic, and people will naturally discover what you're building.

Phase 3: Scaling to 1000+ Customers (Building the Growth Engine)

You've found Product-Market Fit and have one channel that works. Now it's time to scale.

• Product Focus (50%): Your focus shifts from core features to scalability, reliability, and security. You start building for the “next” customer profile—maybe moving upmarket or serving an adjacent use case. You invest in infrastructure and performance. You can now afford to build features that expand your Total Addressable Market (TAM).

• Growth Focus (50%): Pour gasoline on the fire. Double down on the channel that's working. If SEO is working, hire a content writer or an agency to 4x your output. If outreach is working, hire an SDR and build out a formal sales process. Once your primary channel is systemized, you can begin carefully experimenting with a second channel. This is the stage where you hire your first dedicated marketing lead.

How to Implement Growth Without a Marketing Team

This all sounds great, but in Phases 1 and 2, it’s just you and your co-founder. How do you actually do this?

Leverage Your Founder Superpower: Authenticity

You know the product, the market, and the customer's pain better than any marketing person you could hire. Use that. Don't try to write slick marketing copy. Write like you speak. Document your journey. Share your learnings. Write blog posts that start with “As a founder, I struggled with X, so I built Y to solve it.” This raw, authentic perspective is your single greatest marketing asset.

The "One Channel" Rule

I’m repeating this because it’s the most common mistake founders make. Do not try to be on Twitter, start a podcast, run Google Ads, and write on a blog all at once. You will do all of them poorly and conclude that “marketing doesn’t work.” Pick one channel. The one channel that gives you the most direct access to your ICP. And give it a real, six-month commitment before you judge the results.

Choosing Your Path: DIY vs. Done-For-You

As a founder, your time is your most valuable asset. You have to decide where to spend it.

• The DIY Path: If you have more time than money, or if marketing is a core competency for your business (e.g., you're building a marketing tool), you should roll up your sleeves and learn. For founders who prefer a hands-on approach and want to assemble their own growth systems, a self-service platform like our AgentWeb build tool can provide the modular components to get started.

• The Outsourcing Path: If you have more money than time, and your expertise is 100% in product and engineering, the smart move is to hire experts. Your time is better spent building the product and talking to users than fumbling with SEO tools or A/B testing ad copy. For busy founders who need a trusted partner to build and run their growth engine, a done-for-you service like AgentWeb can be the perfect solution to scale without losing focus on the product.

Understanding the Investment

Don't view marketing as a cost center. It's an investment in distribution with a measurable ROI. The right question isn't "how much does marketing cost?" but "what is my Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and how does it compare to my Lifetime Value (LTV)?" Good marketing lowers your CAC over time by building assets like brand equity and organic traffic. When evaluating options, compare the fully-loaded cost of an in-house hire (salary, benefits, tools, training) against the cost of an expert agency. Often, you'll find that an agency provides more expertise for a similar or lower investment, which you can explore on any transparent pricing page to understand the value.

Final Thoughts: Product and Growth are Two Sides of the Same Coin

The founder's dilemma isn't a choice between product and growth. It’s about creating a flywheel where they feed each other.

A great product with strong retention makes marketing easier and cheaper because users stick around, refer others, and increase LTV.

Great marketing brings in a steady stream of new users who provide the feedback, revenue, and validation you need to build an even better product.

Stop seeing them as separate functions competing for your time. Start seeing them as a single, unified engine for building a company that lasts. Your job as a founder is to be the chief engineer of that entire engine, not just one part of it.

Ready to put your marketing on autopilot? Book a call with Harsha to walk through your current marketing workflow and see how AgentWeb can help you scale.