I Thought Building the Product Would Be the Hard Part...

There are so many things no one tells you before you become a founder.

People tell you fundraising is hard. They tell you hiring is hard. They tell you building the product is hard.

All true.

But no one sat me down and said, "By the way... marketing is going to make you question your sanity."

I don't think I truly appreciated marketing until I had to do it myself.

When I worked at startups before, marketing was another department. They had campaigns, creative meetings, metrics, dashboards, and deadlines. I knew it was important, but I don't think I understood the weight of it. Now that Perzimo is my company, every marketing decision feels personal because every dollar matters.

It's funny because people think marketing is about making beautiful ads or coming up with clever taglines. That's maybe five percent of the job.

The other ninety five percent is running experiments.

And then running another experiment because the first one didn't work.

And then changing the experiment because Meta changed its algorithm.

And then realizing the landing page is actually the problem.

Then fixing the landing page only to discover your messaging is wrong.

Then changing the messaging and watching your conversion rate improve while your retention quietly drops.

I swear marketing feels like fixing one leak in your house only to find two new ones in the basement.

Every tiny improvement breaks something else.

I have gained a whole new level of respect for marketers.

Not because they always know the answer.

Because they keep searching for it.

I don't think enough companies appreciate just how experimental marketing really is.

We celebrate successful campaigns as if someone magically knew exactly what would work.

Most of the time they didn't.

They tested. They failed. They learned.

Then they tested again.

Startups don't have the luxury of throwing millions of dollars at awareness campaigns. Every dollar has to justify its existence. We all want lower acquisition costs and better returns, but before any of that happens, someone has to figure out what message actually makes people stop scrolling.

That part isn't science.

It's creativity mixed with psychology mixed with data mixed with educated guessing. And a little bit of luck.

The speed at which marketing changes is another thing that blows my mind.

Confession.

I had never heard the term UGC until maybe two months ago.

Now I hear it every single day. Investors ask about it. Agencies specialize in it. Founder friends talk about it. Creators talk about it.

Suddenly my vocabulary has completely changed, and I'm discussing creator economics, Spark Ads, CPMs, hooks, retention curves, and creative testing like I've been doing it forever.

I have not.

I'm learning in public.

Every founder is.

Which leads me to something I've been wondering lately.

Does anyone actually know what they're doing?

Or are we all just making the best decisions we can with the information we have today?

Because that's what it feels like. People love to say founders need to be decisive. What they don't tell you is that you have to be decisive when there's no obvious right answer.

That, to me, is the hardest part of being a Founder. Before Perzimo, I loved strategy meetings. I'd happily argue both sides of an idea. I'd poke holes in plans. I'd challenge assumptions. I'd help shape the decision.

Someone else made the final call.

Now I'm that someone else.

There is no one to look at across the table and say, "What do you think we should do?"

Eventually everyone looks back at you. That is both incredibly empowering and mildly terrifying. Actually... more than mildly.

I used to think great founders had some secret ability to see around corners.

Now I think they just get comfortable making imperfect decisions.

They know they won't get everything right. They know half their assumptions will probably be wrong. They know today's brilliant strategy could become tomorrow's expensive lesson. They move anyway. I suppose that's entrepreneurship.

It's not having all the answers. It's becoming comfortable asking better questions.

So if you're another founder reading this and wondering whether everyone else has secretly figured it out...

I don't think they have.

I think we're all just trying our best.

Running experiments.

Learning faster than we did yesterday.

Changing our minds when the data tells us to.

And hoping that one of those experiments becomes the thing that changes everything.

If that's true, maybe none of us are winging it.

Maybe this is just what building something new looks like.