🧞♂️ New to Exponential Scale? Each week, I provide tools, tips, and tricks for tiny teams with big ambitions that want to scale big. For more: Exponential Scale Podcast | Scalebrate | Scalebrate Hub
Founding Supporters: Support the following people and companies because they supported us from the beginning: DataEI | Dr. Bob Schatz | .Tech Domains | Fairman Studios | Jean-Philippe Martin | RocketSmart AI | UMBC
In today's newsletter:
Latest Podcasts: What You Missed
Ambitious… But Lazy - What if the real goal of building a business isn’t doing more… but getting things to work without you?
10,000+ Customers With 15 People – How SweepBright scaled to over 10,000 customers with a team of just 15. A practical conversation with Raphael Bochner on leverage, focus, and designing a business that grows without growing headcount.
Hiring without Hiring – How to scale without adding payroll or burning out.
Want to Scale? ICP: Do You Know Me? – Stop selling to everyone. This episode focuses on defining your ICP so you can scale with better clients and less chaos.
The 10 Money Skills Every Microteam Should Master – You’re great at what you do. But if the money side of your business feels confusing, stressful, or weirdly fragile, this episode is required listening.
Fix Problems in Public: Don't Just Post "Wins”
Open LinkedIn or Twitter right now. Scroll for 30 seconds.
What do you see?
"Just hit $100K MRR!"
"Closed our biggest deal ever!"
"Hired our 10th employee!"
"Featured in [Major Publication]!"
Win after win after win. Everyone's crushing it. Nobody's struggling.
And if you're in the middle of a tough month with revenue down, client churned, product launch flopped, you start to think: "What am I doing wrong? Why is everyone else winning and I'm barely surviving?"
Here's the truth: they're struggling too. They're just not posting about it.
And that silence isn't just annoying, it's costing you.
The Highlight Reel Trap
Here's the problem with only sharing wins: you're optimizing for appearance, not progress.
Think of social media like a photo album.
If you only post the glossy, perfectly-lit shots, you end up with a collection that looks impressive but tells you nothing useful.
What actually helps? The messy, behind-the-scenes photos where you can see the lighting setup, the failed takes, the mistakes you fixed.
That's where the learning is.
When you share only wins, you're creating a facade. And that facade:
Makes other founders feel isolated
Hides the lessons you learned the hard way
Prevents you from getting help when you actually need it
Attracts the wrong kind of attention (vanity metrics, not substance)
But when you share problems, and how you're fixing them, you're doing something way more valuable:
Building trust with your audience
Attracting people who've solved the same problem
Creating genuine connections with other founders
Demonstrating resilience, not just results
The irony? Sharing your struggles makes you more credible, not less.
Why This Matters for High-Leverage Teams
Big companies have PR teams that craft narratives. They can afford to keep problems private because they have layers of insulation.
You're out there on your own. Your personal brand is your company's brand.
Here's why fixing problems in public is especially powerful for small teams:
Trust is your only moat. You don't have a billion-dollar brand. You have your reputation. And honesty builds reputation faster than hype.
Your network is your safety net. When you share problems, other founders jump in to help. That collective knowledge is priceless.
Transparency attracts the right customers. People want to work with real humans, not polished facades. Showing how you handle adversity is a selling point.
You can't afford to solve every problem alone. Big teams can throw resources at issues. You need community, advice, and pattern-matching from others who've been there.
The strongest Scalemaxxing founders share the messy middle and come out stronger for it.
The "Fix in Public" Framework
Here's how to share problems productively without turning your feed into a pity party or oversharing to the point of damaging your brand.