🏆 Top 1% Founders

 👋 Hi there - it’s Egemen.

Staying ahead shouldn’t be left to chance.

There is a lot of good, not-so-good, bad, and ill advice for founders out there.

It’s already tough enough to launch a product, gain customers, hire people to scale and move on with operations.

Bad practices (or malpractices) due to poor advice can cost a lot. One area that I often see lately is in early sales and the dilemma “product-led growth” creates and how it’s misrepresented.

This edition is all about making sure that you stay on top of your game.

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

💡 Spotlight: The Edge You Need

For a while now, I’ve been sharing insights through the newsletter.

But I wanted to create something deeper, more practical, and more hands-on.

So, I’m introducing Membership Packages — a space for founders who want to move faster, make better decisions, and gain an edge.

If the free newsletter has been valuable so far, this takes it to another level.

• Full access to content library (fundraising, product, GTM, growth, and more)

• 100% OFF in Scalable Template Store ($847 value)

• Perks & discounts in 20+ tools and platforms

• Invite-only workshops & masterclasses

• Discounts in all future resources

• Private founders community

• Weekly 1:1s

👉 Become a member today.

🧠 Deep-Dive: Key to Win in Early-Stage SaaS

If your first instinct is to build a signup flow instead of selling, you’re optimizing for convenience, not growth.

I’ve seen this tweet the other day by Albert Mao, the founder of Vectorshift, and I think it’s criminally underrated.

In the early days, founders have to sell. 

That means getting in the trenches, talking to customers, refining your pitch, and closing deals manually.

In my experiences and observations so far, in practice, I can say that product-led growth (PLG) is often misunderstood and misconducted within this context by many founders.

Founders see companies like Slack or Notion and think they can “grow without sales.” But PLG isn’t about skipping sales - it’s what kicks in at scale, when there’s already demand.

👉 This is why most startups fail with self-serve or gradual engagement. 

They think removing friction will bring growth. But if no one is buying, the problem isn’t the funnel—it’s demand. 

Self-serve works when customers already know they need you. At the start, they don’t even know what problem you’re solving for.

In the early days, sales isn’t optional—it’s essential. 

You’re not just selling the product, you’re selling the idea. You’re refining your messaging, learning objections, and figuring out what actually resonates.

PLG doesn’t replace that—it builds on top of it once the messaging is already dialed in.

So PLG isn’t a shortcut to growth. It’s a scaling strategy, not a market-entry strategy. If you skip sales and hope your product speaks for itself, you might never find out why people aren’t buying in the first place.

👉 Early-stage founders need to get their hands dirty, sell manually, and iterate fast.

Check out what our readers also enjoy reading:

🗺️ Method: #1 Bestselling Book on Product-Led Growth

As we talk about product-led growth (or PLG), Wes Bush is the man – with quite literally the nickname of “The PLG Guy”.

I learned a lot about PLG simply by reading through his short book, which is available for free on his website.

👉 If you truly want to have a solid grasp of what product-led growth is, how it should be implemented in your startup properly and how to use it as a growth catalyst - I highly recommend reading this.

⚾️ Catch

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