🦄 Before Growth

👋 Hey — Egemen here. Long intro this week.

I was at a product management event last week, had a chance to reconnect with a few folks I haven’t seen in a long time.

A couple said they kept reading SCALABLE for more than a year now, that meant so much to me. If you’re reading this, and even if we have never met before, thank you. I do my best to keep the content consistently useful, and I hope it resonates.

That said, we have a community of fellow founders all around the world, you can join by becoming a lifetime member here.

Had a brief talk about vanity metrics about product success metrics, and it made me go back to the recent Sam Altman podcast, where he talked about PMF. It’s about one thing really:

Love.

Not MAUs. Not revenue.
Love.

Ask yourself: Do users genuinely love what you’ve built? So much that they tell friends? Post about it? Recommend it unprompted?

If not, why are you chasing growth?

Today, we’re talking about that a little bit.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

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🧠 Deep-Dive: Love or Let Die

I’m all for launching things fast but here’s what usually happens:

• You launch something “decent”

• You chase users

• You throw in some “growth hacks”

• Numbers go up

• Retention sucks

• Investors notice

• You scramble

You never built something people cared about. You just built numbers.

That works for a while until it doesn’t.

Forget the vanity metrics for now. You don’t need a dashboard full of graphs to tell you whether your product matters. What you need is clarity. What exactly are you building? What problem are you solving? Who actually loves it? Not who tolerates it. Not who’s mildly interested. Who feels something when they use it?

It almost pisses me off to a certain degree that a ton of startups mess this up.

They build hollow products. They follow “playbooks”. They optimize for the wrong metrics. And even if they grow, they stall because no one cares deeply enough to stick around. No one feels a connection. There's no mission, no gravity, no pull.

My two cents if you’re about to “scale up”:

👉 If people don’t love it, don’t grow it.
Fix the product first.

Check out what our readers also enjoy reading:

🗺️ Method

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⚾️ Catch: How People Get Rich Now

I love Paul Graham’s good old website. One of the gems I read this week was an edition he posted in April 2021, around how people get rich now, it actually helps you understand the dynamics of inequality from a different perspective.

I found it from Garry Tan’s X:

☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Omnisent

Omnisent raised $3M for real time sound AI – it’s the scale of the week!

Here’s what they do:

• builds ultra-low-power edge devices that capture and process ambient (non-speech) sounds in real time,

• detects and interprets real-world acoustic patterns like leaks or machinery anomalies

• focuses on industrial applications, starting with compressed-air leak detection.

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