'The sky is the limit' said every founder once

From Emmy Award winners to e-commerce founders, media moguls, family-run boutiques, and everything in between, I’ve spoken to nearly 2,500 founders since my e-commerce journey kicked off six years ago.

Despite my career still being fuelled by caffeine and optimism, the reality I face every day is that most of the businesses I speak with won’t make it past the next year or two. While speaking to founders and learning what it is that inspires them to get up and keep doing “it” is one of the perks of the job, I’ve grown somewhat numb to hearing the same line: “The sky’s the limit.” Or some version of it. The most common might be “there’s so much potential for us with the right partner.”

The agency-founder kick-off call conversation…

Founder: We’ve done the research. Massive audience. Huge demand. Basically the sky is the limit in this category, we just need the right strategic partner and investor.

Me: Amazing. Quick question though. When you say sky are we talking cruising altitude, or like... drone height?

Founder: No no, proper sky. Stratosphere stuff. We’re going all the way up.

Me: Interesting, because your PPC account is hitting turbulence at about 200 feet.

Founder: We need a new creative partner and agency to help us, that’s the issue. I feel like our current agency isn’t doing a great job.

Me: Your current agency isn’t doing a bad job. Your fundamentals are fine at the account level, looks like you have a good creative strategy in place, yet your CPA’s are sitting at 3x targets?

Founder: I know, but I think with the right partner, we could really take this to the next level. Our total addressable market is enormous, product feedback’s amazing, and retention is excellent.

Me: Absolutely. But your click through rate suggests the addressable market isn’t currently addressing you back.

Founder: Well, the audience is definitely out there. Maybe we just need to push harder.

Me: What about Amazon? Or Wholesale? These are great alternatives if PPC seems to be struggling a bit. Maybe we explore those options? Or perhaps we could rethink our branding or audience to try and compete with a slightly more aggressive persona than the one we’re being bulked into now?

Founder: But Amazon will just copy our product and launch a cheaper version, and wholesale payment terms are terrible. I’d rather see if we can make DTC work first.

Me: I’m just saying before we talk limit we need to clear the clouds, pass security and stop the engines catching fire on takeoff.

Why an MVP should be your first investment, not your last

Paid media, especially Facebook and Google, has quietly become one of the first questions investors ask and one of the first things bootstrappers obsess over. What is your target CPA? What can you realistically acquire a customer for? It seems tactical, but it often decides whether an idea becomes a brand or becomes a tax write off.

So when you are building a brand, or even exploring the idea of one, you have to think ahead to what the paid media journey could look like. Before you invest in product development, packaging, branding or web design. Because here is the part founders only learn later. Once the product exists, very little of what happens on paid sits under their control.

In 2020, the glory days when remarketing, audience segmentation, lookalikes and prospecting actually meant something, I’d be arguing otherwise. Now, very little of what happens inside a Meta account is becoming the agency’s responsibility. Creative can be automated (though most brands disable these features due to weak output), Advantage Plus campaigns require less manual toggling and remarketing is cloudy at best.

Overall, on Meta especially, influence is far lower than people assume. Google gives you visibility into auctions and intent. Meta gives you creative, tone, offer, and then asks you to hope for the best. Campaign structure, audience targeting and segmentation are becoming ornamental. I genuinely think you could skip interest targeting entirely and your results would converge into roughly the same place.

If paid media is going to matter for your brand, it is far better to learn this before launch. I wrote recently about incubators as the most underrated form of validation, and how AI now allows founders to validate a brand before it exists. If app developers have MVPs, why shouldn’t brand builders. Using a model like Claude to create a credible landing page, pairing it with four to six strong assets and running a simple test site will give you a signal that is far cheaper than raising capital for something Meta might instantly reject.

We have worked with brands across more than a dozen categories, and I have watched brilliant science, deep founder research, thoughtful product development and strong brand personas all collide with a Meta auction that refuses to cooperate. When that happens, marketing drops to the bottom of the priority list, even though it was the one variable that could have de risked everything.

Which is why founders need to understand the altitude they are actually working with. The sky might be the limit. Meta might disagree.