“You can have product market fit but kind of not fully understand it. Building that initial growth flywheel is a pretty different skill set than the operational side. You have to figure out who and why and then what channels.”

Start Building the Growth Flywheel Before You Operationalize — They Require Different Skills

Sean Ellis draws a sharp line between building the first growth flywheel (who needs this, why, which channel works, what business model fits that channel) and operationalizing growth (dashboards, team accountability, scalable systems). Most founders skip straight to ops. The flywheel phase requires deep qualitative insight and channel hypothesis testing; only after one channel proves out do dashboards have anything to manage.