Field notes

Hiring an editor before hiring a growth lead

Four companies that inverted the usual order, and what it did to their first-year retention.

7 min · Bengaluru

The conventional sequence puts acquisition first and voice somewhere after the Series B. Four companies in our sample did the opposite, for reasons that were mostly accidental.

All four report the same second-order effect: sales cycles shortened because the material prospects read before the first call did more of the work. None of them can isolate the variable, and all four would do it again.

The counter-argument is real. An editor with nothing to publish is an expensive hire. The four that worked had a genuine backlog of unwritten knowledge before they hired one.

Reported by the CliqueTrees newsroom. Corrections run at the top of the following edition, set in the same size as the mistake.