When early-stage startups think about growth, most assume they need a marketing budget. They picture ads, PR agencies, or AI-written blog posts as the key to “getting noticed.” But in reality, awareness doesn’t come from spending money: it comes from focus and authenticity.
The startups I’ve seen struggle the most are often those trying to scale too early by outsourcing their voice. They flood LinkedIn or Medium with AI-written how-to articles, or hire consultants to “create buzz” around a product that still hasn’t found its centre of gravity. The problem with this approach is that it’s artificial. It amplifies noise instead of truth. Real awareness happens when the product becomes a solution to a pain that someone in an industry truly feels (and since marketing is a multiplier, if you still don’t have clarity on what a minimum viable product is and what it should do, you’re multiplying failure even more).
Marketing
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4 minutes reading
Nov 3, 2025
Bishop, J. (2018) Small green plant growing in sand. [Photograph]. Unsplash. Available at: https://unsplash.com/photos/vGjGvtSfys4 • Like planting a seed, every genuine product effort you nurture grows in visibility naturally. When what you plant is real value, the world will see it, talk about it, and share its fruits. No ads can replace that kind of growth.
The real foundation of growth
When Y Combinator talks about what truly drives a startup’s success, they never start with marketing or PR. They start with growth (as in: solving one real problem for one real customer and making them love you for it). Their advice is simple and brutal: stop iterating in the dark. Get the product in people’s hands as early as possible. Observe what happens. Learn fast.
This is where most startups fail. They pour energy into appearing bigger rather than becoming sharper. They think marketing means awareness, but awareness without clarity is vanity. You don’t need more people to hear your message; you need the right people to experience your solution.
Design: solve the pain, don't paint it
At the early stage, your job is not to make things pretty (it’s to make them make sense). Visual design is nice to have (but it’s not essential, especially in B2B). What matters is how users interact with your product and whether that interaction dissolves friction.
Experience design is about diagnosing the problem correctly (understanding what actually hurts) and crafting the most direct way to remove that pain. It’s not about decoration; it’s about reduction. The Y Combinator mindset echoes this perfectly: launch early, even if it’s rough, because feedback is the fastest form of design iteration. A clean interface that solves the wrong problem is still useless.
So before you obsess over UI polish, ask: can someone with this problem use my product once and immediately see its value? If yes, you’re doing real experience design. If not, you’re painting over confusion.
Engineering: it just needs to work
Engineering should serve learning, not perfection. The product doesn’t need to scale beautifully; it needs to work today. The best founders I’ve worked with understood that 90 percent of their early code would eventually be thrown away. That’s fine. It’s not wasted effort: it’s learning in motion.
Y Combinator reinforces this point relentlessly: “Launch something that works, even if it’s ugly.” The number one mistake founders make is over-engineering too early, chasing scalability before usability.
The truth is, architecture can always be rewritten; user indifference cannot. If no one uses your product, it doesn’t matter how clean your codebase is. Ship it, break it, learn why, and rebuild better.
Marketing: a team sport, not a department
Marketing is not a job title: it’s a shared behaviour across the company. In the early stage, everyone should be part of telling the story. The founders, engineers, and designers should all be in conversation with users (listening, sharing, showing progress, and talking about how real problems are being solved).
Hiring PR firms or outsourcing “awareness” too early is one of the most common mistakes I see. As many Y Combinator talks puts it, some founders waste $$$$ on PR before realising they could have simply spoken directly to users.
The best marketing doesn’t look like marketing: it looks like genuine conversation. When your team writes posts, records short videos, or shares progress updates directly, you’re not “promoting” the product; you’re documenting its journey. That creates authenticity and momentum.
The perfect moment to start doing this is when you have at least one customer who would be angry if you took your product away from them. That’s when the story becomes powerful. You’re not talking about what your product could do, you’re showing what it did do. That’s how awareness grows organically.
The pattern of startups that win
Every successful startup I’ve seen (from pre-seed through Series A) shared the same DNA: they balanced three things evenly (experience design, engineering, and marketing) and refused to let one overshadow the others.
They didn’t obsess over adding more features just to look busy (feature bloat is a symptom of insecurity). They focused on solving one problem deeply, talking to their users openly, and shipping intentionally. Their awareness wasn’t manufactured: it was earned.
By contrast, the startups that struggled were those that built in isolation or tried to buy their way into relevance. They didn’t lack money; they lacked focus.
Closing (?) thoughts
Startups don’t fail because they can’t buy attention; they fail because they never earned it.
Don’t try to sound bigger. Try to sound clearer. Build what matters, talk to the people who care, and let them tell your story for you. When you get that right, awareness follows naturally (and no paid campaign can compete with that kind of authenticity).
