Stop being the bottleneck
At some point the founder-as-marketing-team stops scaling and starts capping growth. This plan puts that point near $20k MRR, which is our judgement, not a measured figure.
Target: Founder time on execution below 20%
Inside this
- Write the SOP set20h
One page per recurring motion. You already wrote the first in Phase 3.
- Hire the first marketing execution role40h
Execution, not strategy. You still own strategy at this size and should.
- Institute the weekly metrics review30m
Same day, same five numbers, thirty minutes. The ritual is the point.
- Build the single dashboard everyone reads8h
If there are two dashboards there is no dashboard.
- Report the share of new revenue that came from systems that ran without you45m
The phase exit is 60%. Count a source only if nobody touched it last week.
- Hand over the recurring reports first, and anything that sends or spends last1h
Internal, frequent, easy-to-check work goes first — the daily numbers, the weekly research — because a wrong answer costs nothing and shows within a day. Run each by hand until the output is right, then put it on a schedule; anything that talks to a customer or spends money keeps waiting for your yes, and the next job starts only once this one runs clean.
- Count views per post the week posting goes automatic, against the hand-posted baseline30m
Automated posting can fail without an error: one account’s scheduled posts got 0–2 views each, against about 290 for the posts done by hand, and nobody noticed because nothing counted views. If reach drops, post by hand until you know why.