Warning: FMFD can be lethal to your start-up

FMFD is my own acronym for Founder’s Magic Fairy Dust*. I’ve seen the fixation on FMFD many, many times, and the frantic search for Founder’s Magic Fairy Dust can easily derail a young company (or otherwise severely impair its sanity and health).

It begins innocently. The start-up founders have a grand plan, which includes a brilliant strategy for viral (or cheap) customer acquisition, outstanding retention and engagement, high conversion rates, and respectable LTVs.

Then reality happens. Things don’t go exactly as hoped. And the frantic search for sweet and elusive FMFD begins.

As a VP of Marketing (or interim CMO in a consulting capacity), I have often had to “manage” founders in their fevered search for Magic Fairy Dust — they want to find some FMFD ASAP and sprinkle it on their start-up to “get them back on plan”.

The urgency that the founder(s) demonstrate in searching for FMFD is often inversely proportional to the amount of real marketing expertise and/or deft product management skill that the founders possess. In the worst cases, these competencies are viewed as simple functions that can be debugged or quickly re-worked and restored to the expected trajectory.

Stated more clearly, the founder(s) under-estimate the expertise and organizational commitment required to deliver a compelling product experience and/or marketing competency to propel the company into a period of high-growth. And panic ensues.

Other factors that correlate highly with a twitching, hyperactive search for FMFD include:

• the perceived effort or time required to close the gap between current and expected/desired KPIs
• the amount of ego damage the founder feels that they will suffer when they have to re-visit projections with their team and investors
• the amount of hubris the founder(s) brought to bear in constructing the original grand plan

It’s easy to sound whimsical about it, but this belief that FMFD exists and is findable has a very similar fall-out to substance addiction. There is denial. There is paranoia. There is panic. There is second-guessing of those around you. There are gripping pangs of hopelessness and self-doubt. And sometimes a palpable sense of desperation when the new ideas about where to find the FMFD suggests places that are really hard to reach with the resources you’ve got.

Every company must make adjustments and iterate, casting about to look for fractions of a percent wherever they can and even find a little magic. In fact, that iterative mindset of test and control and iterate to improve is absolutely critical to success. But not when you pin all of your company’s hopes on endless little tweaks in lieu of a product experience that impresses and delights users and marketing discipline with some horsepower. There is no replacement for sitting with 20 people, one at a time, as they experience your product for the first time. Or investing the time to optimize for search crawlers. Or isolating and optimizing all of the variables in your paid search campaigns. Or really obsessing over the new user on-boarding paths, messages, and touchpoints. Or leveraging the social graph with the right placement and subtlety. Or mining the database to draw correlations and insights from sequential user cohorts. And so on, etc … it’s all hard work, but it represents a foundational competency on which a young company can build a learning curve and growth curve.

That’s why the mirage of FMFD is so enticing: if it was real, it would relieve the company of lots of grappling and intensive work and cash burn. The allure of a sprinkle of FMFD to knock down the projections is more attractive than doing all of the rigorous push-ups to get strong enough to wrestle them to the ground.

*FMFD might also be known as “silver bullet”, but my resulting acronym is not as cool