Every founder wants to hire a great growth marketer, but I’ve learned (the hard way) that your stack can still slow them down. I used to be that technical founder who built everything in custom code—website, email flows, the whole thing—until every “small marketing tweak” needed engineering time. After investing in 30+ startups and talking to hundreds of founders, the pattern is consistent: growth doesn’t fail from lack of effort, it fails because the system gets messy, unclear, and harder than it needs to be. In this video, I break down the startup growth stack we actually use (and keep seeing work) across three core areas: website/SEO, email, and partnerships. For the website, the big takeaway is simple: your marketing site isn’t a dev project—it’s a marketing function. That’s why we recommend Framer or Webflow so your team can ship landing pages, iterate copy, and run SEO updates without waiting on engineers. For email, I explain why legacy tools like SendGrid/Postmark feel stuck in a different era, and why we like modern platforms—Resend if you want everything in code, but Loops if you want visual, event-driven flows that handle both marketing and transactional emails in one place. And for distribution, I get into why affiliate programs often flop (clunky tooling, broken tracking, payout/tax headaches) and why we’re big fans of Dub Partners—especially for attribution, developer experience, and sane pricing compared to PartnerStack.