What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Product Growth

Every founder wants growth.

More customers, more revenue and faster traction all feel like signs that a business is moving in the right direction. But chasing every opportunity can easily pull a company away from what it set out to build.

A recent episode of Nothing Ventured explored what it takes to build an AI company in a fast-moving, highly regulated market. While many of the examples came from healthcare, the conversation centred on challenges that founders across sectors face: product focus, customer selection, AI adoption and making difficult trade-offs.

Don’t build around edge cases

One of the biggest mistakes founders make is turning existing ways of working into software without questioning whether those processes are the right place to start.

People with years of industry experience often remember the unusual situations because they’re the ones that required the most attention. The problem is that building products around those rare scenarios can slow development and make products less useful for everyone else.

Instead, founders should take a step back, look at the problem through a different lens and understand the core issue before deciding what to build.

Customer conversations are important, but they shouldn’t replace data-led decision making. Building around what customers ask for today isn’t always the same as solving the problem they actually have.

AI products need constant iteration

The conversation also challenged the idea that adding AI automatically creates a better product.

Early on, the business rewrote its technical architecture, moving from relying heavily on large language models to using smaller, specialised agents focused on individual tasks. The result was a system that was cheaper, faster and more effective.

The discussion also highlighted that products which perform well during early pilots don’t always perform well at enterprise scale. As customer numbers grow, founders need to keep monitoring performance, improving their systems and adapting to new developments in AI.

Building an AI company isn’t a one-time exercise. It’s a continuous process of learning and iteration.

Not every customer is the right customer

When customers ask for features that move the product away from its original direction, founders should be willing to walk away from the revenue.

That can feel uncomfortable, especially during the early stages of growth, but constantly changing the roadmap creates a fragmented product and an unclear message.

Instead, founders should stay focused on the market they originally set out to serve.

The conversation also explored the challenge of selling to both enterprise customers and smaller organisations. Pursuing both can work, but only if the product roadmap remains centred on the long-term strategy.

Once smaller customers begin dictating the roadmap, product development becomes increasingly fragmented and the business risks losing the positioning it wants to build.

Sometimes slower growth is the better outcome if it allows the business to stay focused on its long-term vision.

AI should solve the right problems

Another important takeaway was that AI shouldn’t be the starting point.

Before introducing AI, founders should first understand the workflow they want to improve. Then they should standardise how information moves through that workflow and automate what they can without AI.

Only after those steps should AI become part of the solution.

Even then, AI works best when certain conditions are met.

The discussion highlighted three questions founders should ask:

• Is the decision repeatable?
• Is the risk tolerable?
• Is the decision reversible?

Where those conditions exist, AI can improve productivity and reduce manual work.

Where decisions involve significant judgement or where the consequences of getting something wrong are too high, human oversight remains essential.

The goal isn’t to remove people entirely. It’s to allow them to spend more time on the decisions that matter most.

Why this matters for founders

Many of these decisions don’t show up immediately in revenue.

Choosing not to build a feature, walking away from a customer or accepting slower growth can feel uncomfortable in the short term, but they all shape the long-term direction of the business.

From our perspective at EmergeOne, these are exactly the kinds of strategic decisions founders shouldn’t make in isolation. Whether it’s deciding which customers fit your long-term vision, balancing enterprise opportunities against quicker wins, or understanding the financial impact of slower, more focused growth, these choices have lasting consequences.

A fractional CFO isn’t there to encourage growth at any cost. They’re there to help founders understand the trade-offs, stay aligned with their strategy and make decisions that build a stronger business over time.

As this conversation showed, sometimes the hardest decision is also the right one.