Building a team and founder-led growth: From first hire to first advocates

Cost: Free

A practical session for founders on making the leap from solo operator to effective leader by building the right first team and a repeatable customer acquisition engine without losing momentum.

What you’ll learn

• Identify the key roles and qualities to prioritise in your first hires to maximise impact without overextending your budget.
• Leverage founder-led sales and marketing to acquire your first customers and turn them into genuine brand advocates.
• Build a simple, repeatable customer acquisition funnel — from awareness to retention — that scales as your team and market grow.

Description
You’ve validated your idea and found early traction — now what? The transition from solo founder to team leader is one of the most critical and least discussed stages of startup growth. Get it wrong and you burn through cash, culture, and momentum.

In this interactive session, fractional CMO Daniel Johnson shares a practical playbook for building your first team and driving customer acquisition as a founder. Drawing on a decade of experience scaling startups from Seed to Series B, Daniel covers how to make smart early hires that complement your strengths, how to use founder-led growth to win your first paying customers and advocates, and how to build a repeatable acquisition engine — from awareness through to retention.

Whether you’re hiring your first employee or building out a small team for international expansion, this session will equip you with the frameworks to grow with confidence and avoid the most common founder mistakes.

Speakers
Daniel Johnson
Founding Partner, We Scale Startups

Daniel Johnson is a growth marketing executive with over 10 years of experience helping tech startups achieve predictable growth. As the Founding Partner of We Scale Startups, he has managed over £6M in ad spend and driven more than £15M in client revenue. A serial entrepreneur, Daniel successfully founded and exited his own e-commerce business. He is also a respected Growth Mentor for Google and Techstars and a visiting lecturer at Cambridge University.

There are no terms of business.