"Most founder advice tells you to delegate fast and focus on your strengths. After six years of building Percent, a private credit marketplace, from $80,000 in credit card debt to a Series B, I believe the opposite: The founders who win are the ones who do wear every hat as they go through their journey. I'm not advocating for micromanagement or control issues. I'm talking about building irreplaceable domain knowledge by trying each job before you hand it off."
"In 2018-2019, I was simultaneously acting as a customer success representative, quality assurance (QA) tester, content creator, and budget manager. My calendar was chaos: customer calls at 5 p.m., debugging the platform at 11 p.m., pitching investors at 8 a.m. Most people see this as unsustainable. They're right. What they miss is that doing customer success myself revealed which 10% of our features actually drove retention. Managing contractors taught me exactly what excellence looked like in each function."
Founders who wear every hat early in a company's life gain deep, irreplaceable domain knowledge across functions. Early roles can include customer success, QA, content, budgeting, contractor management, product debugging, and investor pitches. Immersion enables pattern recognition that reveals which features drive retention and how customer needs shape roadmap, messaging, and fundraising. Hands-on experience shows excellence standards for outsourced work and clarifies the point to delegate: when over 60% of time is spent on repetitive tasks rather than strategy. This approach avoids micromanagement yet prioritizes understanding before handing off responsibilities, increasing odds of building enduring companies.
Read at Fast Company
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