What five years of building a business taught me about sustaining growth after the startup phase

Every January, my LinkedIn feed fills with the same energy. ‘We’ve just launched X business’ or ‘we’re excited to announce’ but by Q2, most of that momentum has disappeared. The numbers don’t move like they did in the launch window and founders are forced to confront that attention and traction are not the same thing.

I’ve watched this cycle repeat for years and with mass layoffs across tech, media and the public sector pushing more people into entrepreneurship than ever before, the stakes feel different now. Many of today’s new founders didn’t choose this path, they were pushed onto it so the emotional high of launching can mask the reality that starting a business in the current climate means navigating rising costs, tighter consumer spending and an AI revolution that’s rewriting entire industries in real time.

I run a culture intelligence and creative agency. That means my job, every day, is to read where music, identity, community and consumer behaviour are heading before the market catches up. And what I’m reading right now is an environment where the founders who survive will be the ones who understood the business world well enough to build for what’s coming, not what’s already here.

CORD Media Group has survived and thrived the last five years. We’ve delivered over 90 client projects for brands including Nike, YouTube, Red Bull and Universal Music Group and worked with more than 1,000 creators, keeping a high retention rate with pretty much all clients.

And we’ve done all of it without a website, outside funding and initially without a fancy office but nothing about that trajectory was linear and the lessons that got us here are not the ones you’ll find in most startup advice columns.

The bootstrap trap

Most founders over-invest in the launch and under-invest in what comes after. They pour energy into logos, websites, launch events and marketing before they’ve worked out what people need from them. I call it the MacBook approach because Apple has spent decades and billions earning the position where they can build something and trust the world will want it.

They’ve invested in R&D, brand equity and ecosystem lock-in that makes that confidence rational. Most founders haven’t done any of that groundwork but operate with the same assumption: what I’ve built is so good, people just need to hear about it. So, marketing becomes the priority instead of listening.

To break it down even further, imagine someone who’s brilliant at photography. They set up an agency, launch it, get a few clients and it feels great but the business stalls because what the market wants is videography. They’ve turned down those enquiries because it doesn’t fit their vision. Meanwhile, the market has moved on without them. This is where bootstrap businesses die quietly, from a slow refusal to let the market tell them what it needs. The founder walks away believing the demand wasn’t there, when the truth is the demand was knocking on their door and they turned it away to protect a vision nobody asked for.

We could have easily fallen into that. We started CORD as a social media page for music fans, but the business only grew when we stopped leading with what we wanted to make and started paying close attention to what clients were asking for. We consciously put client needs ahead of our own creative instincts not abandoning creativity but channelling it toward solving real problems. That meant building products and services around demand rather than packaging up what excited us and trying to force it into the market.

When short-form content shifted from a marketing add-on to the primary way audiences discover artists, we’d already restructured our delivery model around it. That’s what happens when you build a business by listening to culture instead of waiting for clients to tell you what culture is doing.

Today, 90% of our revenue comes from products that didn’t exist before 2023. The business we run now looks almost nothing like the one we launched and that adaptability is the reason we’re still here.

The false confidence curve

The early clients who came through curiosity or goodwill don’t automatically become repeat business and that’s where most founders quit because the emotional cost of starting again from inside something you’ve already built feels worse than walking away.

The only thing that pulled us through that stretch was honesty. Being humble enough to accept that what we’d planned probably wasn’t going to unfold the way we imagined and being willing to let go of the version of the business we were emotionally attached to.

Slack went through the same thing, unprofitable, scattered across features, trying to be everything, until they found the one thing that worked: chat. They built a billion-pound business from a single feature their users loved. That story is far more common than the Steve Jobs narrative of inventing something so perfect the world has no choice but to want it.

Most of us must find product-market fit the slow way, sitting in discomfort, running experiments that fail, resisting the urge to scale something that hasn’t been validated just because you’re tired of waiting. The founders who I believe will do well are the ones who understand that you can have belief in where they’re heading and honesty about how far they still must go.

Empathy as a competitive moat

Client retention has been central to our growth and the reason we’ve held onto relationships is anticipation. Understanding what makes a client anxious before they tell you. Feeling when a campaign matters to someone’s career, not just their brand. Growing alongside them as people, not just accounts.

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When you operate from that place, people become internal champions for your brand and help you grow the business organically

That trust is how we ended up building entirely new service lines with partners like Universal Music Group. We didn’t pitch for that work in the traditional sense. We’d earned it by understanding what their artists and audiences needed before it became a formal brief, reading cultural shifts in black music and knowing where community was heading before it showed up in the data. The same pattern played out across our creator campaigns. Over 50 collaborations built not from cold outreach but from being so embedded in the culture that the right people already knew what we could do.

The best thing you can do as a founder is stay ahead of where your clients need to be before they’ve even realised it themselves. Right now, that means understanding that audiences are more fragmented than ever, brand trust is at historic lows, political and economic uncertainty is making both brands and consumers more cautious, and cultural trends move at the speed of a timeline.

What being CEO means

I want to be direct about this because I think it matters, especially for founders who are romanticising the title. Being a CEO is the ultimate form of accountability. Every mistake lands on you. Every win lands on you. And in business, you lose more days than you win.

I left the creative work I loved, editing, making content, work I was good at and that had delivered real results, because the business needed me somewhere else. It was a sacrifice because leadership is a service role. And if you can hold that perspective through the difficult middle stretch, you come out of it with something most founders never build: a business that people actually rely on.

What I’d tell a founder right now

If you launched this year and the momentum is stalling, it’s okay. The next steps now are to stop trying to scale what hasn’t been validated, listen more than you pitch, find the one thing your customers genuinely value and build everything around it. And don’t be fooled by the launch. The founders who make it to year five aren’t the ones with the best Q1, they’re the ones who adapted when Q1 stopped mattering.