Stop Borrowing Someone Else’s Stage

What I keep telling founders who are between $100K and $1M and wondering what's next

I’ve had three conversations in the last month, all with passionate, enthusiastic founders, all somewhere between $100K and $1M in annual revenue. Different products and different categories, but almost the exact same questions.

How do I build my brand? Should I be hosting events? When does PR make sense?

And every time, I found myself saying some version of: Here’s my $0.02, take it or leave it, and remember that none of us know anything…BUT….I don’t think that should be your focus right now.

Here’s what I think is actually happening. The moves that $10M+ brands make are very visible. The the pop-up, the launch event, the NYTimes placement, the brand film. You see it on Instagram, on LinkedIn, at conferences. So founders who are earlier than that start doing what smart people naturally do: they look up, they borrow the playbook, and they start solving problems they don’t actually have yet.

The real job at $100K to $1M

One channel, done really well. Not two, not three. DTC before retail, or one anchor retailer before you add more. I know retail feels like credibility. It mostly isn’t, not at this stage. It’s complexity, and complexity before your model is dialed in is expensive in ways that are hard to undo.

Understanding who is actually buying from you and why they come back. Not your imagined customer, not your mood board customer. The real one. This is the whole job, honestly. Everything else is downstream of it.

SKU discipline!! Every product you add is a new demand on your attention, your cash, your customer’s understanding of what you are. You don’t need a full line. You need the right things, selling well and repeatedly.

And paid media. I feel strongly about this one.

The advice I see most founders at this stage get is to avoid paid, focus on organic, let the community grow naturally. And I understand the instinct. But I think skipping paid early is one of the more expensive mistakes you can make, just not in the way people think.

Paid isn’t just a growth lever. It’s a learning tool.

When you run paid, you find out fast what messaging actually makes someone stop and click. You find out which version of your story converts, vs. which version sounds great in a pitch deck but means nothing to a stranger. You find out who your real customer is.

Founders who avoid paid often spend years with a beautiful brand and a fuzzy understanding of what actually moves their customer. So when it’s time to scale, they’re guessing. Paid replaces guessing with data. You don’t need a huge budget. You need enough to test, learn, and iterate.

Think of it as market research that can pay you back.

And then: email

Once someone buys, email is how you keep them. It’s also one of the most underleveraged tools I see at this stage, which honestly surprises me every time.

Your email list is the only audience you actually own. Not Meta, not Instagram, not TikTok. Those platforms can change an algorithm tomorrow and your reach disappears. Your list doesn’t. So building it early, and learning how to talk to it, is one of the most compounding things you can do right now.

This doesn’t have to be complicated. A welcome flow, a post-purchase sequence, a consistent send. The founders who figure out email at $300K are so much better positioned at $1M than the ones who treat it as an afterthought. It teaches you how to tell your story in a way that actually lands, over and over, to people who have already said yes to you once.

On pop ups and PR: not yet, and here’s why

Pop ups amplify a brand that already exists. If you have customers who talk about your product without being asked, an event can deepen that. But if you’re between $100K and $1M and still building that foundation, a pop up is an expensive way to feel like you’re doing something. (I say this with so much love because I have been there.)

The thing nobody tells you is that a pop up is not a marketing strategy, it’s a distribution problem. You have to get people to show up. That means paid marketing, foot traffic you don’t control, and a lot of energy that could have gone toward the channels that actually compound. Until your word-of-mouth is doing real work, the event itself won’t create the pull you’re hoping for. Build the brand first. The event will mean something later.

Same with PR, though the conversation there has shifted a lot in the last decade. When I was starting Brightland in 2018, a strong press hit was a real lever. Publications had reach, editorial was editorial, and a Bon Appétit mention could do something. I used PR as a tool in those early years and it made sense at the time.

That landscape barely exists anymore. Print and digital media have contracted dramatically. Editorial coverage is increasingly entangled with affiliate, which means the incentive structure has changed, and so has the value of the hit itself. A spike in traffic from a press mention today is smaller, shorter, and less sticky than it was five years ago. At $300K in revenue, a good placement will move your traffic for a week and mostly disappear. The real question is what happens after the spike. Do you have the email flow, the retention infrastructure, the product experience that turns a curious visitor into someone who comes back? If not, it’s a leaky bucket, and PR just filled it temporarily.

(If you want a really sharp breakdown of what actually changes at each revenue stage, this piece by Taylor Sicard is worth bookmarking.)

And I’ll end with how I started: there are always, always outliers. I may be completely wrong on the above. You may try one of the above and find immense success! I’m simply sharing what I’ve seen over the course of 8 years in business, watching hundreds of brands and friends’ companies over this time, in the hopes that it saves you some $$ and heart/headaches!