Podbit · The iGaming Leader
Instead of promoting his heads-of layer to C-suite roles based on loyalty, Savvas ran everyone — including himself — through an executive competency benchmarking programme. The result: almost nobody passed. What followed was one of the most painful but defining moments in MrQ's history.
Where this was said
At 25:40 · chapter starts 23:00
The hardest part of MrQ's growth — harder than building the product, harder than the pivot from tech to product-led thinking, harder than the tax shock — was the people decisions. Savvas traces the arc: the startup phase of doing everything yourself, then reaching 50-70 people and having to operationalise, then realising the problem had shifted from technology to product leadership. Mistakes were made in hiring; the biggest ones were always about fit, not competence. Then came the moment of reckoning: Savvas wanted to build a proper C-suite, but didn't want to promote heads-of based on loyalty alone. So he put the entire layer — and himself — through an executive competency benchmarking programme, with the explicit promise that if the data said he also shouldn't be CEO, he'd step aside. The result was stark: almost nobody in the existing team benchmarked at C-level. Savvas had to face that reality with people who had been on the journey with him for years. Not everyone stayed, but many did — partly because of how the conversation was handled: honestly, openly, with the acknowledgment that what got the business here would not get it to the next stage.
Savvas promoted someone prematurely, reversed the decision, then called the entire heads-of layer into a room and admitted his mistake openly. No spin, no explanation — just cards on the table. The result: most of those people are still at MrQ today.
Perfecting a product for months guarantees nothing. The Starter Story founder pressed publish on his meticulously crafted site and watched zero users arrive — the brutal lesson every founder needs to hear.
The world's best companies didn't buy their first customers — they went to where those customers already were and created content for them. Free channels like Reddit aren't a hack; they're the actual strategy.
A single link post on Reddit drove 100 visitors to Starter Story in minutes. Then the moderators deleted it. That deletion became the catalyst for a far smarter strategy.
Redditors hate spam — so stop looking like spam. By putting all his content directly into a self-post and adding only a tiny footer link, the Starter Story founder made his marketing invisible to moderators and irresistible to readers.
Going from zero engagement to hundreds of upvotes overnight isn't luck — it's product-market fit. When your content makes strangers ask for more, you've found something real.
Reddit traffic is borrowed. An email list is owned. The Starter Story founder built tens of thousands of subscribers before Reddit banned him — meaning the platform's death sentence didn't matter.
After interviewing thousands of successful founders, one pattern repeats: they all built something, got ignored, and then figured out distribution. Building was never the hard part — getting in front of customers was.
Spend 80% of your landing page design time above the fold. The hero section is the only thing most visitors will ever truly read, so it needs to deliver your full message instantly.
Avnish grew his solo business to $25,000 per month in just 15 months without spending a dollar on ads. His entire growth engine was built on community posts in Reddit and Facebook groups.
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