Avoiding the Early Growth Startup Mistakes with Foti Panagiotakopoulos

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[00:00:15] Sani: Welcome to NoHacksShow, a weekly podcast in which smart people talk to you about better online experiences. This episode is about growth and startups, with a guest who is more than qualified to talk about all things growth. If you want to learn more about things you should focus on, as well as things to avoid in the early growth stage of your startup, this is the episode for you.

Foti Panea Takopoulos, welcome to NoHacksShow.

[00:00:38] Foti: Thanks for having me.

[00:00:40] Sani: Pleasure to have you on. So, uh, when you started Growth Mentor back in 2017, uh, and I know you're in Greece now, but you used to live in Cyprus, a small, beautiful island in the middle of the Mediterranean. At first glance, that situation for anything tech related, there's a lot of disadvantages in that kind of setup, you know, being remote, being in an island that is not really known for its being tech savvy.

But what were some of the advantages that you had? Back then.

[00:01:09] Foti: Uh, the advantages was that, um, external advantages, probably not that, not that many. It was more just of the mindset of just having to figure things out on your own. Um, you know, when you're put in a situation where you don't really have, um, that supportive ecosystem, uh, people to bounce ideas off of, you know, or it's not San Francisco or anything like that, you tend to just have to figure things out.

Um, and that's what I did. Yeah, that's, I guess you just look at the half full glass analogy kind of thing, right,

[00:01:43] Sani: I like that. So if you were in San Francisco back then, we would not have growth mentors, basically

[00:01:48] Foti: Probably not.

[00:01:49] Sani: Probably not. Okay. That's, that's very interesting. So we're talking about early growth, startup mistakes, and someone who's all about growth, like you are, we'll have a lot of stories there.

So, you know, let's, let's talk about what, what growth stage for a startup is like, when does it begin? When should startups start considering growth?

[00:02:09] Foti: Uh, Day Zero.

[00:02:11] Sani: That is zero. Okay. I'm not surprised, but, uh, but tell me why.

[00:02:15] Foti: Uh, because if you don't have a growth, I mean, uh, Paul Graham wrote an article, Startups Equal Growth, right? Um, it's kind of one of his famous essays and the definition of a startup is something that grows quickly, you know, scale, and, uh, that is, um, something that the seeds need to be planted from day zero, right?

So when you're building your product, when you're even wireframing it out, um, you know that it's going to cost money to build it, um, and As sane individuals, we don't want to burn that money, right? So you have to think about how you're going to grow it right now. Do you have to start investing in all of your channels and, you know, marketing let's call it marketing, right?

No, not necessarily, but growth does begin from the inception. There needs to be that planted in that DNA, uh, that force foreshadowing of what, what am I going to do next? How, how is the product aligned with a potential future growth strategy, which obviously will. It's never going to be exactly like you, like you thought it would, uh, it's going to be like with GrowthMentor, I had a bunch of different ideas, right, of how we would market it and take it to market and different things I would do, experiments.

I ended up, um, Trying most of them, but most of them failed, right? But the fact that, you know, I had a plan in the beginning, uh, was very calming on my nerves. Like, okay, great, I'm going to invest all this money in building this, but at least I kind of have a roadmap. Um, obviously we're going to go off, we're going to take detours here and there, but you have to have a plan.

So growth in terms of like, how, when do, I think the, the question though is, What you really, like, I'm guessing what you meant is like, when do you start, like, actually running experiments and, and marketing? Is that, is that what you, that's what you mean, right? Yeah. So,

[00:04:04] Sani: Hmm.

[00:04:05] Foti: so probably as soon as, as soon as possible, I think a lot of startups just started in shadow mode, uh, for stealth mode for, for way too long.

Uh, and, and they're thinking maybe, Hey, you know, let's wait until the product's a little bit more ready. Um, I mean, we need to build that extra feature. You know, the big drawback from that is that, uh, you're not getting the reverberations from the market, uh, from your audience. And, and then, you know, you, you end up launching it and, um, nobody even cares, right?

And it's, you built the wrong features, the wrong product for the wrong audience. Uh, and, and that's why I think there needs to be at least some emphasis on, on communication, um, to the outside, to the ether, right, from, from the, from the gecko.

[00:04:47] Sani: And that should begin even before there's, you know what the product market fit is exactly. Like you should,

[00:04:53] Foti: yeah, that's that's how you find the product market fit by going through that exercise, right? It's painful. Hell yeah, but it's gotta be done.

[00:05:01] Sani: It's supposed to be painful, right? Is what some would say.

[00:05:04] Foti: growth, growth equals pain, right? You

[00:05:06] Sani: Grow the Eagle's pain. Yeah. Yeah. I've, I've heard that on, on this podcast, even a few times. Uh, so, uh, basically what you're saying and I cannot disagree with that is it's almost catastrophic. If you go into that stealth mode, building a product, building, building your startup, and then hoping things just catch on, like people figure it out and

[00:05:27] Foti: Yeah, yeah, the product doesn't sell itself. And a lot of people are worried that their ideas are going to get stolen. It's like, come on, it's 2024. Your idea is probably not that bad. Not that unique. Um, and even if it is, right, it's the motivation behind it, uh, and the ability to execute, which matters more than anything, especially in this day of AI, where, um, even high quality technology coding has been commoditized, right?

So it's who can really the differentiator now is who can execute, right? Because, um, I mean, ideas are the cost of amazing ideas plummeted 90%. So it's how do you, how do you take that and run faster than anybody else in the right direction?

[00:06:10] Sani: In the right direction. It's beautiful times, right? And right direction like this was going to be my next question. How do you know what the most important thing is to focus on to grow or what the right direction is like? These are just always test, test, test, experiment and then figure it out. Or is there more to it?

[00:06:28] Foti: know for sure. And I think that you'll, you need to get used to that feeling that you don't know what the most important thing. I'm five years into growth mentor. And some days I wake up and I have. No idea if what I'm doing is the right, right thing, right? Um, but I generally have a mental model though, um, that I like to, to use and it's, it's based upon the concept of velocity, right?

So what is velocity? It's speed times direction. Uh, speed, speed in a certain direction, right? So, um, I, I like to put, imagine like a speed times quality of execution in parentheses times the correct direction, right? Uh, so you, you have a couple of variables here. You have speed, right? Speed for me is one of the most important things in, in startups, right?

The ability to, to do things really quickly, which if you do something fast, like imagine, A blog post, right? I don't know if anyone's ever hired a blog post or a writer or a content marketer and you say, Hey, write me this post. It takes me three days to like get it perfect, right? You know, afterwards you're like, I'm not going to sign you another post because you just wasted, you know, three business days on this thing, right?

And you're not going to assume it's, uh, um, uh, assign more, more of that task to the person. And, uh, you know, systems which, um, uh, eat resources quicker are fed more. Resources. That's, that's the thing. So speed, speed is incredibly important. Uh, and the only way to actually get fast is to do something over and over and over again, right?

Fast. Uh, and that means you're obviously going to fail at some point, right? Which is interesting because you have to juxtapose that against the quality of the execution. Speed without any quality, you're just going to constantly beat. Uh, and, and how do you increase your, your quality and that's by upscaling yourself or by bringing in people that are excellent around you to have the skills that you don't have.

Uh, but then you might ask yourself, well, you know, how do I know if I should upscale myself or should I hire somebody else? And that's, that's where you have to have a level of introspection and honesty with yourself and say, Hey, what is the confidence level that I have that I can get really good at this thing, right?

That I'm trying to do. Like for me. I knew that I would never be able to learn how to code Ruby on Rails good enough to be able to accomplish my objectives. So I knew I had to outsource that. I had to hire a dev, dev house, right? But with marketing, it was plausible that I might be able to wear the hat of head of content, head of performance marketing, head of insert gear, whatever marketing function it is, and upscale myself to that level, which effectively was basically like a substitute for me.

For racing PC at the end of the day because I ended up wearing the hats of multiple people that I otherwise would have had to spend You know five six figures salary a year, right? So and Then you have the whole concept of like the direction, right? So speed times quality execution and then times the direction How do you know you're an even movie if you're going fast and the quality is great?

Are you moving in the right direction? Is this the right thing to do? And that, that really boils down to how well do you understand the, the, the, the pain, right? The problem statement of that you're trying to solve. And to understand that you need to talk to a lot of people, right? You need to talk to your customers.

You need to talk to customers of your competitors. You need to be looking at their websites. You need to be reading the G2 reviews of your competitors. You have to really immerse yourself. Uh, and um, yeah, you can get a lot of qualitative data. Unstructured. Thankfully now with AI you can just take that qualitative and dump it in there, which it's It's a double edged sword that, right?

Because again, it cheapens the insights and then you just take it for granted and you again It's like this bogging down of the mind, right? When you have it leads to fragmentation if you just have way too many data points in how much can you actually synthesize? but Yeah, I mean that's that's kind of the the model that I that I I kind of think by speed quality and then direction Are we going tangentially in the right way and and and?

You know, it, it, the thing is like, how do you know what to work on? What's the most important thing in terms of marketing and growth? Since this episode is about, you know, early stage growth, startup mistakes, a lot of the conversation that I have on Growth Mentor is about prioritization, right? What of marketing channels, SEO versus performance marketing versus influencer marketing versus outbound sales versus partnerships, uh, should I build backlinks first, all of this stuff, right?

Um, and. The answer is that, I don't know, you don't know, nobody knows, none of the mentors know, nobody has any clue, right? Except for you, if you do the work and you collect first party data, right? First party data is the result of actually doing shit. So if you do stuff, you will get Data back and then you feed that back into your, your loop, your little growth system that we talked about, right?

Where you have to, you know, input data and then make decisions to make sure that you're going in the right direction. And then it comes down to the work and the, you know, in the hustle of speed and just making sure that you're, you're, you're, you're doing it well, right? So that really for me is like how I view about view growth and I, I just think that, yeah, conceptually, it's just about trying a lot of shit and make sure that you're learning from that.

Um, Yeah, and

[00:11:41] Sani: And building a system,

[00:11:43] Foti: you know?

[00:11:44] Sani: and building a system around all that, but yeah, you said, uh, a speed quality and direction. You need to get all three. Like you, you must get all three done and you must excel at all three, like fail. Obviously if you fail direction, no one cares. No one

[00:12:00] Foti: Nothing else matters, yeah. It's like a rally car going off a, you know, you can put a thousand

[00:12:04] Sani: backwards.

[00:12:05] Foti: fast, but you're going off a cliff, like, okay.

[00:12:08] Sani: That's a great analogy because a lot of startups end up like rally cars one way or another. Uh, but yeah, so you quickly mentioned wearing different hats and figuring out if this is something you can do yourself. What, what if a startup, let's say it's, it's like some tech people building a product, building a startup that they hope, you know, they, they, they, they make it big, but they don't have a marketing.

They don't have a growth team. You know, what's the best approach then going to something like growth mentor or like hiring or is, I know it's, it depends. I know it's always, it depends, but like, what would you, what would you tell them they should do?

[00:12:44] Foti: If you have under 10, 000 in cash in general in your bank account, which I know so many startup founders do, they have an amazing idea, they're not sitting on, on, you know, a boatload of cash, You're probably going to have to upskill yourself, right? You're going to have to do all the work. So how do you learn really, really quickly?

What we mentioned earlier about speed, you get faster by doing things often, right? So you have to index higher on doing the thing, right? So my general philosophy is if you don't have more than 10 grand in the bank and you don't want to waste all of it hiring people, right, especially if you're pre revenue, you're going to have to learn the job of multiple people.

So how do you do that? As quick as possible, you, um, I like, let me give you an example, right? Like you're, you want to learn a new performance marketing channel, right? Facebook ads. You can spend a day reading about it, you know, watching YouTube videos, log into the panel. So anyone can do without putting any money into it.

Uh, create a Facebook business manager account and set up campaigns. Um, A to Z, uh, after you spend one full day researching about it, you don't need more than a day to figure out how to, it's point and click, right? Like, you know, it's not that complicated. Um, and then once you hit that brick wall, where it's like, okay, crap, I have to put the credit card in and press go, then you jump on a call with somebody who's done it before really well and be like, look, this is what I've done.

What mistakes am I making? Um, is it okay? You'll be surprised. Maybe they'll log in on a screen share and say, Hey, actually, you did this amazing. And just that gives you the confidence to kind of keep going, right? Alternatively, you could, of course, spend 2, 000 to a very premium course and spend eight weeks on a cohort based learning path and, you know, um, do it that way.

But time is the most precious. resource that, that, that we have and can never take get it back. So you just don't have that, that luxury most of the time. So spend all that time learning and it's a, you know, it's this dopamine release mechanism that, that it tricks you into feeling like you're actually being productive.

But in reality, like what actually is happening, right? Nothing. So, um, do stuff quickly and just talk to people once you get stuck and get unstuck and then rinse and repeat. Uh, but active learning, that's, I'm a very big proponent of active learning versus passive learning. Uh, so yeah, and then if you get stuck and you feel like, Oh shit, you know, like I can do this really well now, but like if I just spent 30 an hour on some guy from Upwork and he can do it 70 percent as good as me, hire that person out, you know, that's fine.

I used to work with freelance, I mean, I still do, but like freelancers for me are our goal. I use Upwork all the time. Now I built my own sort of freelance network with growth, uh, mentor. So yeah, definitely don't try and do everything forever. You're going to burn yourself out. But, uh, in the beginning, yeah, it's not gonna be, uh, you know, a walk in the park.

There's no, there's no hacks here, right?

[00:15:45] Sani: It's not pretty at all. Yeah, exactly. Okay, could you, without naming names of the startups, could you give me some examples of horrible mistakes in early growth stage that you can think of right now?

[00:15:56] Foti: Um, spending 30, 000 on, uh, performance marketing ads. You know, when you've gotten 100, 000 in funding and then making, maybe making, like, three sign ups of 1, 000 LTV. Like, most of the mistakes happen from doing ads prematurely that I've seen with a lot of the startups. Um, other mistakes are, are spending an egregious amount of money building features that, uh, got zero adoption.

I've made that mistake many times. Uh, just built stuff on for growth mentor and I thought this is, this is going to crush like I know it, right? And this, you'd launch it. No, no one cares. Actually, the most used feature on growth mentor was the cheapest, easiest, easiest one that we just, as an after that lists.

Where you can click on the mentor head and like add people to list like a little playlist that that's that has Tremendous adoption right and it's like wow Um, but then we built an entire other section called community kind of like a linkedin play where you can send a connection request Nobody even used that uh,

[00:16:56] Sani: they have LinkedIn. So do you think

[00:17:01] Foti: but I thought mine was going to be better Mine would be different because i'm fonty the girl hunter founder, you know

[00:17:06] Sani: you're doing other things better. So you're doing a lot of things really well there. Uh, so basically something like, uh, what was it a painted door test test? Like, was that a name, you know, basically create a fake feature, like a facade of a feature and see if people try to interact with it.

Is

[00:17:20] Foti: Yes, I'm starting to get more into that mentality a little bit more probably like if I would have thought a little bit more like that a couple years ago, I would have saved a lot of money. But yeah, I'm a big fan of that.

[00:17:32] Sani: Okay. So basically learned, uh, figure out what needs to be done before actually doing it. I mean, it's, it's always the way to go to the way

[00:17:40] Foti: Yeah, just just a flint flintstone it. I was reading this one book, I forgot what it was, but there was an analogy flint flintstone it, you know, the flintstones, the characters in the back and the bottom. Yeah, just like manually do things like just pretend that it's a magical AI in the back. Yeah

[00:17:56] Sani: pretty cool. That's pretty cool. So let's get to growth mentor then. Uh, I mean, A lot of people know what it is, but let's assume the listeners don't. How would you explain what a growth mentor is?

[00:18:07] Foti: How do I explain it so it's people helping people get unstuck with growth marketing product and startup related challenges Just because it feels good to help people out. Right? So it's an ecosystem of people that Genuinely want to help right and talk about what they love doing Growth is one of the few like professions That people can talk about it for free without getting paid and actually, like, enjoy it, have a good time.

Go to a plumber and say, you know, I want you to help me talk about my plum Like, they're not going to want to talk about it. Get the hell out of here, you know. It's my day

[00:18:42] Sani: Usually no, yeah.

[00:18:43] Foti: You know what I mean? But, like, with us, for some reason, like, it's just like, it gets the It's exciting, you know. Uh, it's something about it, right?

So, like, there's a lot of people in growth, on Growth Venture, where you can just come on, you pay a subscription fee, it's pretty low, um, and then you can just book unlimited calls with specialists. We're on for specific topics that you're stuck on. So, you know, be it content performance and, and yeah, and then you leave a review and everyone's happy.

[00:19:11] Sani: It's an awesome place and to everyone who's not a member or hasn't checked it out. It's growthmentor. com, right? That's that's the URL. That's where you should go and check out and sign up. I want to hear about the origin story I read the article I will and I'll link that in the description the article that you wrote like six years ago I don't know when it was a while ago about Scratching your own itch with growth mentor.

I want to hear like the early early. We're talking about early stage here in

[00:19:38] Foti: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I wrote that article like a month before we launched it and we were in like a prelaunch, like it's coming soon. You know, it was our manifesto post and I have never updated it since. So that is literally like. The article you scroll to the bottom of it and it's like please early beta testers come and try us It's funny to look back at it, but, um, yeah, the, the origin was that I was a VP of growth at a, at a tech company that my older brother founded, uh, and the first non engineer hire.

Uh, I studied finance, uh, thought I, you know, Oh, I started fine. So how hard could marketing be? And he's like, come over here. And since 2007, I joined him and he's like, Take over the marketing stuff and I'll be like, yeah, okay, cool. Let's do it. So I jumped in and I knew nothing about marketing. I was like, yeah, let's, this is going to be easy.

It was not. So the first six months I was, I had no idea what anything tech was like, what's HTML, CSS. It was crazy. Like the, the, the, the learning, but, um. I quickly kind of started to get in the hang of what, what all this stuff meant. And my first thing that I, that I, first channel that I, uh, excelled at was SEO.

And within the first three years we ended up like doubling revenue from like 50 to 100 grand a month. Uh, just from the count of SEO by making many landing pages. Like at that point you could blow on a website and, and it would rank higher by just putting like. WordPress comment bank, like backlinks. It was the glory days of SEO before the penguin update and all that stuff.

Right. But then fast forward a couple of years, we start having AWS, uh, Google clouds, all of these other, uh, uh, major competitors come into our space and it got a lot tighter and that channel kind of dried up the effectiveness. So I had to start learning. Performance marketing to compete, um, because I hired some consultants to help and they just did a terrible job and I got disillusioned with the whole concept of outsourcing that I figured I can learn.

This isn't that bad. But then I started getting really addicted to content. content over consumption demoralized me. For two years, I would just constantly re blog posts and wa because I, I was scared of execute, like pushing the button go because it was a lot of money at stake. The, the before the budget.

And like, I would, I would start a little bit, I it wouldn't, there wouldn't really be. And your ROI and I would stop it and restart. Stop it, restart. And then I, I had this idea of just instead of hiring somebody to do it for me, I would, um. hire freelancers on Upwork to just talk to them and say, Hey, this is what I'm thinking about this.

Can I do a screen share, show you my campaigns and just tell me, like, am I in the right direction? Yeah, just by having these conversations, um, it helped me break through learning plateaus of my own. And then I used it for other things as well, like email marketing, customer success programs, like for everything I was working on, I would just book 30 minute calls on Upwork with different freelancers just to talk to them.

And I was like, holy shit, like this is so much more efficient use of my time than just spending hours. Like reading crap blogs, right? Because the moment that you read something on a blog, it's outdated. For them to write it, first of all, like, it's already happened in the past and also, don't be silly. I mean, most of these people are saving the golden nugget for themselves.

Like, they're not saying everything. When I, even me, like, I'll write blog posts, but like, you know, there's not like 1%, 2 percent that I'm not, I'm not putting public

[00:23:03] Sani: and to be clear, that's fine,

[00:23:05] Foti: Yeah

[00:23:06] Sani: that's how it's supposed to be,

[00:23:07] Foti: It's supposed to be like that's business 101 right so like but when you're on a call with somebody that that's not really there right like I like if someone's on a call with me on a mentor call I'm talking to them I will literally pull up a screen share and show them my exact documentation my google search console I'll show them everything because I'm I'm feeling the buzz right I'm like we're having the chat I kind of want to brag a bit I'm like check out how I do this you know uh it's the mentor hi you And then you get like from the source, like before they even get a chance to write a blog post about it or jump on a podcast, you get to talk to the operators doing the thing, right?

So I experienced that by hacking the process on Upwork. And then I'm like, how come this isn't like a thing, right? So yeah, that's, that was why I decided to build it. Um, and at that point in time, my wife was teaching English online. on this platform called I talk i uh, dot com. It's probably the biggest like, uh, language tutor platform in the, in the world or one of the biggest.

And she was doing like six, seven hours a day of calls. And I was looking at her and I was like, huh, that product's kind of cool. So it connects people that wanna learn a language with the person who wants to teach a language and the medium of communication, Skype. So that means they didn't even build a web, RTC, anything.

Like, there's not really tech, it's just like a, like, it's not, it, it was like. It wasn't that complicated in my head. I was like, all right, let's break it down. All right So we need to have a mentor profile or a supply profile and the demand profile and then a calendar booking and like that That is like, all right, we can do this.

Let's break it down, you know Then just start doing the math. We're like, all right Well, how much would it cost to to build this feature that feature and and yeah once you can once you can can conceptualize something in your head and break it down into its constituent pieces and Anything's doable, right?

You just, you have to, like, visualize it in your, like, reality is created twice, right? It's my favorite quote. First in the mind, and then in reality, right? But you have to visualize it first, right? But to visualize things in the right way, you have to be exposed to certain different products. You have to be curious, right?

So this is, yeah.

[00:25:14] Sani: Very well said. And like you said, coming up with that concept of what's turned out to be growth mentor, like if you wanted to just jump into and build, I'm going to build this thing, it's not happening, but breaking it down into smaller pieces you can manage like that, that that's, that's when shit gets done basically.

So what was the MVP like? Like the growth mentor really, I'm curious about history of tech and history of startups and, and, and things like growth mentor.

[00:25:38] Foti: Uh, I had a pure HTML landing page, um, and, um, uh, form, uh, where you could put your email address in to get to get early access. When they would do that, um, I would then send them, uh, email, um, with a form, a type form and say, fill this in and you'll get free for life access to growth mentor, um, and, uh, just answer these questions though.

But that was the user research section, right? That was the validation phase. Uh, and I would jump on a call with them and ask them a bunch of different questions about what their challenges are. And do they have any mentors? Like, just get all the dirt, right? And, uh, after I did around 20 of these calls, I'm like, alright, enough is enough.

It's like, this is a thing. Like, people have this pain point. And then I hired a, uh, software house based in Poland. Uh, who the CEO was my wife's, uh, students. She was teaching him English for the last five years before that. So like there's already that sort of connection. We flew to Poland, showed them the designs that we had made.

Me and my designer, like we made the full clickable prototype. Uh, and I said, give me an estimate. And they're like, yeah, this will probably cost like 30, 30 grants, but just know that that number I'm going to give you probably multiplied by two. Um, and at that point in time, like I was about to buy a car.

Um, and I was like, all right, I'm not going to buy that BMW. I'm just going to put all that money into this thing. And if it fails, I'll just pretend I crashed the car and they didn't cover it with insurance or whatever, but life would go on, right? Like if that happens, I, I had to kind of like brainwash myself with these sort of hypothetical scenarios in order to be able to stomach the idea that I might lose all my money.

Um, but I took the risk and it paid off. I went literally all in like at. Numerous times the last, that, that next year, like I almost went bankrupt and I didn't have money to pay my developers or rent anything. And, uh, until I figured out the monetization model of putting a subscription paywall, but that was around nine months after we launched it.

So it took six months to build the, uh, the actual product, but I skipped the whole MVP of like, let's make it with no code and duh, duh, duh. Like, no, it was just validation. And then all in build the thing. Yeah.

[00:27:49] Sani: which makes, makes perfect sense. I've had 116 guests before you on this podcast, I don't think anyone, 117, I don't think anyone embodies walk to walk. Principle better than you do like to be honest because this like I saw this idea. I'm gonna build it I know this person who's gonna build it for like it's all about like light bulbs turning on and figuring out how to get stuff done Like the thing you're going towards that that is a really cool story one Quick segment about growth expert, which is a new thing that you just launched now So tell me what that is and how it's different in growth mentor

[00:28:22] Foti: Yeah, so growthexpert. io is a other, uh, let's call it the sister, uh, the alter ego of growth mentor. So I like to make this analogy church versus state, right? So church is growth mentor and that's the sanctuary of advice and, you know, karma and we help people because it feels good and we're all good people and we sing Kumbaya, right?

But the state is growth expert. That's where like. We talk business and, and you know, we were charged like a lot of money and we get paid for our time, right? And that's where if you want us to actually like do the work for you, right? So I built this loop whereby if a mentor has 10 reviews or more on growth mentor and they're, and they've done one free session in the last 30 days, they get access to a database of all the leads that come in from growth expert.

And then we connect them with super qualified post PMF. or VC funded startups that are looking for fractional growth talent, 0 percent commission and no referral fees, a hundred percent free, uh, for both parties. And it's just a way for us to kind of pay it back to the mentors for being awesome. Uh, and to create that distinction between, all right, this is where we get paid and this is where we, you know, help people out.

So like the value prop, a growth expert is we have some of the best growth talent, um, around like. That also are nice, cool, friendly people that are on GrowthMentor, fully validated by the community with the reviews there and you can hire them for work and actually the pricing is quite reasonable. You get a fractional head of growth for like, I don't know, 1, a month and just have them there like for a couple of days a month.

Um, Doing, doing their thing, right? You don't necessarily need, this is one other thing I realized as a startup, right? I've gone through the whole, I've done everything where like, I've hired a six figure employee before, right? And then I've hired the cheap ones and in the middle and like, what I realized though is that you don't necessarily need someone full time in the beginning.

There's not that much to do. Because there's always going to be some weird bottleneck that you're going to hit and then there's like blockers and then they're sitting idle and then you as the founder you have to like Work hard to like think of new things for them to do because you're paying for the time, right?

So like you want to make sure that they're fully occupied and that whole process is very mentally exhausting. Right. So like having someone as a, as a part time basis, accountable to a specific either metric or objective or project, I think is the way to go in an earlier stage or even late stage, honestly, like, you know, even if we would be making five times more revenue than today, like I would still kind of take this model of like, Hey, I want this specific thing done, it's going to take 20 hours, how much do you want for that time, you know, 2, 000, okay, here, take it, boom, take 2 grand, I want 20 hours worth of your time, right, cause like, for smart people, like, 10 hours even, it's like, that's a lot of time, like, you know, I can do a lot of shit in 10 hours, right, so if you pay someone up front 10 hours, up front though, right, they're going to be like, oh my god, you trusted me with that 10 hours up front, Thank you, first of all.

Let's get to work and do some rad work, right? And usually they'll end up working even more than the 10 hours, they'll put more effort. But if you nickel and dime and be like, I want the screen sharing thing so I can track your time and all of that. Like, that's ridiculous, right?

[00:31:43] Sani: that's not it. But also like 2000 a month or 2000, not, not a month, even if they just tell you, don't do these three things because you're going to get screwed if you do them and you're going to lose a lot of money and you'll burn

[00:31:55] Foti: Yeah.

[00:31:56] Sani: it's Way more than worth it like that just add investments to to prevent yourself from burning out We are running out of time here, but 40 I I love the conversation I love talking to energetic people and you are one of them for sure.

So One last time, growthmentor. com, growthexpert. io. And of course people can find you on LinkedIn and connect with you on LinkedIn. Thank you for being a guest. It was a pleasure to talk to you and to everyone listening to this and learning from Foti, uh, thank you as well. Please consider rating, reviewing, and sharing this episode.

I will talk to you next week.