Run your own race
How to avoid the biggest mistake in startup marketing.
I’ve spent 15+ years learning startup marketing the hard way (as in, by doing it wrong) and want to help people avoid the mistakes I made. And the biggest error I made as I was starting out was this: Imitation.
Unfortunately, this is an issue I’ve seen in every single team I’ve ever worked with. But I do think it’s preventable.
[Quick note: I’m using the term “startup” as a shorthand, here. This applies to any leader or team trying to introduce something new to the market—whether that’s a product, service, or entire company.]
Three failure modes: Copying Heroes, Rivals, & Past Success
I totally understand why it happens, but that doesn’t make it any less deadly. It’s appealing to both founders with minimal marketing experience and marketing leaders with tons of it. I generally see it in three forms:
→ Failure Mode #1: Copying your favorite companies.
This is particularly dangerous for founders or non-marketing folks who are just getting started.
If you’ve never done marketing before, it’s understandable that you’d look at the best of the best and think, “Yes. That. I’m gonna do that.” The superficial version of this is just copying campaigns from Apple or Nike. But there’s a deeper level, too: Reading books by iconic marketing leaders or CEOs and then trying to just drop their approach into your org.
→ Failure Mode #2: Copying your competitors.
This is appealing to both those unfamiliar with marketing (for similar reasons to Failure Mode #1) and to very experienced marketers, who love Competitive Intelligence and trying to figure out what their rivals are up to.
This sounds like, “It worked for them. They’re going to be taking our market share if we don’t do the same thing!”
→ Failure Mode #3: Copying your previous successes.
This is for the repeat founders or the hired CMO. This one is, “I’ve got a playbook for this.”
It’s the same mistake, 3 ways
All three failure modes actually come back to missing the same inescapable truth: Every company is unique. Not in a “You’re a special special snowflake” kind of way. In a “Success is extremely context dependent” kind of way.
Each failure mode gets more nuanced, but still falls apart for the same reason:
Your favorite company: Probably a completely different industry, product, size, budget, objectives, everything. A trillion-dollar hardware company is an entirely different beast from a new software venture. Plus: What you can actually observe from the outside of a company may be entirely different from the internal dynamics that make it possible.
Your competitors: Okay, these likely have a lot of those variables in common, but for the incumbents you’re trying to displace, their size and budget and objectives are still very different. And for peer competitors, their differentiation and unique advantages (your team, your audience, your target market) should be different… right? (If you’re not visibly distinct from your peers, you’ve got a bigger problem.) And if you’re already established, trying to imitate the tactics of up-and-comers is forfeiting the advantages you have against them. And just like the first failure mode: copying the visible tactics of a competitor is like trying to duplicate the tip of an iceberg without having any idea of what’s beneath it.
Your previous playbooks: This is the most appealing because, in theory, it could translate 1-to-1! If you’ve done it before, you can do it again! In fact, this is the entire premise of many hiring plans: “We want someone who’s done it before.” But… this misses the giant confounding variable that makes this almost impossible for new products and companies: Time changes things. Even if you started the exact same company for the exact same market with the exact same team… Is launching a product in 2026 the same as launching in 2021? Much less 2016 or 2011?? Absolutely not.
Why does this keep happening?
Part of this is just instinctual: We learn from imitation and when you don’t know how to do something, you just follow along with someone else doing it.
And there’s also a degree of FOMO, or, to be fancy about it: Girardian Mimetic Desire. We want what others have. We want to be like those we admire. There’s status to be gained by doing what’s cool.
But there’s another underlying assumption at the root of this: That startups and new ventures work like big companies. And unfortunately… they do not.
Large organizations are literally built around a set of confirmed variables and context. Traditional strategy, forecasting, planning, and operations all work based on the understanding that previous performance can be used to model and then optimize future performance. Big companies have so much experience and data that they can build a repeatable machine to deliver consistent outcomes.
This is, uh, not how a startup works. In a startup, you don’t know any of the variables for sure. Everything has to be uncovered and discovered. So, copying established companies or rivals or previous companies is just plugging in the same figures for what is almost definitely a very different equation.
Bringing in a seasoned leader to apply their playbook can actually be a very smart move in this context, because the constraints are locked and predictable. If someone has run a hugely successful performance ads playbook for a chain of restaurants in one region… there’s a good chance that they’ll be successful in running that same performance ads playbook for a different chain of restaurants in the same region, or maybe the same chain of restaurants in a different region. But again: Even “Successful CMO at ABC Startup in 2016” does NOT translate to “Successful CMO at exact same startup in 2026.”
And it’s getting even worse. Not to get all “Now, more than ever…” on you (hate that phrase), but this Marketing-Strategy-via-Imitation really is even more dangerous/less viable, now.
If we actually consider the specifics of 2026 vs. 2016, the most obvious difference (even more than the end of ZIRP-era growth-at-all-costs) is… AI. And the wild double-disruption of this new technology means that replicating previous successes is even less likely. You cannot assume that any marketing strategy that applied in the last 20 years will transfer 1:1 to your strategy today.
What does this look like?
Let’s be practical, here. If you’re not going to just imitate what other organizations are doing for marketing… what should you do? That’s a bigger topic (and one I’m hoping to write more about in this newsletter, so, y’know, like/subscribe/share/etc, pls), but here’s a quick crash-course on some key examples of how this looks, on the ground:
Choose the right customers for your company. My favorite behavior scientist, BJ Fogg, has a central tenet: “Help people do what they already want to do.” If the behavior you want is “People use my product/service,” then go find the people who already want what you offer. Sounds obvious, but it’s very rarely applied. Convincing people that they should want it is a core activity for bigger companies (and misguided smaller companies), but startups don’t have time for that. So don’t chase a market—go after the absolute best-fit people, who are exactly right for what you do.
Build a growth engine around your constraints. Go read the Balfour Fits to understand the inherent constraints on your strategy. The good and bad news is that you don’t have to/get to pick your distribution channels or revenue model at random. A scalable system all clicks together. And the reason why “engine” is the #1 all-time favorite Growth metaphor is because a really good marketing system operates like that: It’s slow and difficult to assemble at first, but then it drives things forward for a long time. Even in turbulent times, the goal is a repeatable system that can eventually be scaled. But each engine is different, so make sure you understand what you’re actually trying to assemble.
Choose the specific channel where you have an unfair advantage. “We need to be everywhere” is a death sentence for startups. Growth operates on a power law, so your goal is to find the one (maybe two) that works for your company and get really good at it. Go read Growth Levers by Matt Lerner (it’s super short!) and/or Traction by Gabe Weinberg & Justin Mares to learn how to do this.
The humility to learn for yourself
I’ll add a distinction, here: I’m not saying that you should ignore what other people are doing. If there’s a way for you to learn from the successes or failures of others, hopefully that will allow you to dodge those same mistakes.
After all: That’s kind of the goal of me writing this, right?
My point is that you shouldn’t just blindly copy what others are doing or have done in the past.
Probably the biggest insight from The Lean Startup is that the primary objective of this kind of new venture is quantified learning. Again: You’re trying to solve an equation with all the variables unknown. You cannot steal the answers from someone else. You cannot copy their test results.
But you can look for patterns!
I know the idea of “mental models” has become so overdone that people are tired of it, but the core insight from Charlie Munger is that 1:1 copying isn’t very useful, but you can start to notice similar things popping up. Look for things that recur across a lot of companies, a lot of leaders, a lot of examples… and you’ll start to see the trend line emerge.
And the longer the timeline you look at, the higher degree of signal your pattern recognition will have.
As I’ve been reflecting on this whole Post-Information Age thing, this is probably my biggest realization: Even though it feels like everything is changing, a lot more is staying the same. So yes, applying the playbooks from 5, 10, 20 years ago is risky. But there’s a lot to be learned by paying attention to the long history of how humans have made decisions, navigated uncertainty, and conducted marketplace interactions with each other.
That SEO playbook from a few years ago, before all the algorithms changed and ChatGPT created an existential threat to the discipline? Not so much.
Copy-pasting display advertising techniques that don’t work on mobile and ignore recent generations’ documented ad-blindness? No, thanks.
But… recognizing that people in every civilization in recorded history have preferred to transact with people they know and trust? Yep.
Or… knowing that increased efficiency has historically meant increased consumption of a resource, not less (Jevons paradox!)? Yeah, that could be in play.
Short-term precedent is worthless. Long-term precedent is priceless.
So, yes, I get it. I’m super sympathetic to any leader who gets inspired (or intimidated) by a cool campaign or stunt they saw someone else do. But I’ve seen this movie enough times to know: The only playbook that actually works in startups is knowing how to build your own from the ground up, every time.
That’s why, even though the “I already did this, we’ll just use my tactical playbook” marketing leaders (and the orgs that hire them) are doomed to fail, there are individuals who have a track record of incredible startup success. And the pattern I see from them is: A deep humility and desire to learn, and an excitement to build a custom engine for every organization.
They run their own race! I hope you will, too.