The printer is jammed. Again. Your head of growth is also your head of support and your cofounder just shipped straight to prod during lunch. Welcome to the Early Stage. If you’re building with under 15 people, this one’s for you 👇

The second post in my Startup Maturity Framework series is live in my LinkedIn Newsletter. It’s about the scrappiest stage when your team is small, the chaos is real, but the momentum is realer. 🧵 Here are a few things I’ve learned:

You’re not just building a product. You’re building everything at once. Culture. Tech stack. Hiring norms. Decision styles. Tooling duct-taped together with belief. And it all sticks longer than you think.

You’ll sign your first customer and your first angry one. You’ll juggle Google Sheets for accounting and Notion for a roadmap that only exists in your head. Progress > polish. But the signals matter.

Trust beats tooling. The real glue in this stage isn’t your CRM. It’s the people who show up before it all makes sense. Founders, coworkers, mentors, even baristas. This early ecosystem? It makes or breaks the next stage.

Every small decision sets a precedent. • Go async or in-office? • Burnout protocol? • First job description tone? These become culture. And culture scales, whether you mean to or not.