Three things I got wrong about marketing across three startups: 1. I treated it as a phase. "We'll do marketing once the product is ready." Then the product was ready, the launch window closed, and we were starting from zero on awareness with a runway clock ticking. Marketing isn't a phase. It's a habit you build before you need it. 2. I hired it out too early. The first agency we paid wrote posts that sounded nothing like us, ran ads against the wrong audience, and I spent more time briefing them than I would have spent posting myself. Outsourcing only works after you know what good looks like for your business. 3. I confused volume with consistency. We did sprints — two weeks of daily posts, then silence for a month. The algorithm punishes that pattern. So does your audience. Three posts a week, every week, beats fifteen posts in a burst followed by nothing. What I do now is the opposite of all three. Marketing is the first habit, not the last. I run my own content with AI-assisted workflows so I know what good looks like before I delegate. And I optimize for showing up every week, not for output spikes. That's what I'm teaching at my workshop on May 28th in San Jose at the MLK Library, hosted by the Silicon Valley Small Business Development Center. The exact workflows I use now, after three startups and one exit. If you can't make it, book a free 15 to 20 minute marketing audit and I'll help you skip the mistakes I made. https://www.radi8.com/free-audit?utm_source=linkedin&utm_campaign=free_audit&utm_content=post_id DM me if you want the workshop link.