#005. Founder Blind Spots: How Finding What You Miss Unlocks Real Growth
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Hi there, it’s Rebecca.
Over the last nine letters, we’ve talked about a lot of different ecommerce leaks: chasing winning products, building on borrowed platforms, scaling too early, depending on one supplier, confusing revenue with profit and using AI to produce more instead of thinking better.
On the surface, these look like separate problems. Looking back at my own stores, I don’t think they were.
They were different versions of the same problem: I couldn’t see the real leak.
The Hard Part Isn’t Always Fixing the Problem
We tend to think ecommerce is about finding solutions. I’ve come to believe that much of it is about finding the right problem first.
Once you identify the real leak, the next step is often surprisingly clear. The difficulty is that the real leak isn’t always where you first look.
When sales are down, we blame the traffic. When growth stalls, we blame the market. When conversions fall, we blame the website. And when progress slows, we’re tempted to start something new.
I’ve done all of those things.
The uncomfortable truth is that we don’t always have a solution problem. Sometimes, we have a diagnosis problem.
“The bucket is leaking.”
“I know. Where?”
That may be the most honest founder conversation possible. 😂
Before you can fix a leak, you have to find it. The visible problem might be poor sales, rising advertising costs or a crowded market, but the underlying leak could be somewhere else entirely:
- The offer
- The positioning
- The supplier
- The customer experience
- The unit economics
- The operating model
- The assumptions behind the business
Sometimes the leak isn’t inside the business itself. It is inside what we believe about the business.
What My Own Stores Taught Me
When my EZVelo cycling jerseys left me with very little profit, I could have continued trying to improve the advertising. But the deeper problem was the low-ticket model. Advertising costs and returns were consuming the margin before the money reached me.
When my silk-scarf store disappeared during COVID, demand wasn’t the problem. The store had already produced my first €1,000 sales day. The real leak was supplier dependence: one factory controlled the entire product line, and I had no backup when it closed.
My premium fine-jewellery business taught me something different again. The answer wasn’t simply better marketing. The model required more trust, capital, compliance and patience than I had allowed for.
In each case, the most visible symptom pulled my attention away from the structural problem underneath it.
That is what makes blind spots so expensive.
Hard Work Can Make a Blind Spot Worse
You may not be struggling because you aren’t working hard enough. You may be working extremely hard on the wrong thing.
I’ve spent months solving problems that weren’t actually the constraint. I’ve built things that didn’t need building, improved things customers didn’t care about and optimised parts of a business that were not preventing it from growing.
Working harder only made me move faster in the wrong direction.
Effort does not correct a poor diagnosis. It multiplies it.
This is why adding another product, app, funnel or advertising campaign can make a struggling store feel even heavier. You haven’t fixed the leak. You have simply added more water.
None of these lessons were obvious while I was living them. If they had been, I would have fixed them much sooner.
The winning product wasn’t the answer. Another store wasn’t the answer. More traffic, research and complexity weren’t the answers either.
The lessons only became clear after I had lived through the consequences. That is why experience matters.
A checklist or framework can look simple when it is finished. What you don’t see are the mistakes, lost money and wrong turns that revealed why every question needed to be there.
Founder Thinking Begins With Diagnosis
A transaction seeker asks:
“How can I get more sales?”
A founder asks:
“What am I missing?”
Before looking for a solution, confirm the diagnosis. Before scaling, confirm the constraint. Before adding something new, make sure it is genuinely missing.
And before increasing traffic, find out whether the existing economics deserve more traffic.
You don’t need a complicated diagnostic system to begin. Start with three honest questions:
- What evidence tells me this is the real problem?
- Am I looking at the cause or merely its most visible symptom?
- If I fix this, what meaningful result should change?
These questions force you to slow down long enough to see what frantic activity can hide.
Your Margin Edge
A hidden leak rarely affects only one number.
Weak positioning reduces conversion. Poor conversion increases customer-acquisition costs. Rising acquisition costs reduce profit. Reduced profit creates pressure, and pressure can lead to rushed decisions, unnecessary pivots and founder burnout.
One unseen problem begins consuming financial margin, operational margin and personal margin at the same time.
So, before you change another advertisement, add another product or rebuild another page, write down the problem you believe you are solving.
Then ask yourself:
- What evidence tells me this is the real problem?
- Am I looking at the cause or only its most visible symptom?
- If I fix it, what meaningful result should change?
If you cannot answer those questions clearly, don’t add more complexity yet. Step back and keep looking.
Margin gives you the breathing room to investigate before reacting. It allows you to think clearly, test carefully and fix the cause instead of repeatedly treating the symptom.
Think about the business problem you have been trying to solve for the last six months.
Is that actually the problem, or is it simply the most visible symptom?
The answer may change what you do next.
The founder’s job isn’t simply to find more water.
It is to find the leak.
Build Premium. Protect Margin. Compound.
See you next Saturday…
Rebecca.
If you liked the above, you might also like:
#006. Escape the Dropshipping Trap: Build a Brand You Own
#005. Founder Blind Spots: How Finding What You Miss Unlocks Real Growth
#001. Build Less, Profit More: The Winning-Margin Ecommerce Model