Hiring a #strategic #marketing #consultant is better than  hiring too fast.  A guide for struggling #startups in the current market conditions. Here is why. I forgot to mention that @Paul Graham said it. If you're paying attention, you'll be asking at this point not just how to avoid the fatal pinch but how to prevent being default dead. That one is easy: don't hire too fast. Hiring too fast is the biggest killer of startups that raise money. [2] #Founders tell themselves they need to hire to grow. But most err on overestimating this need rather than underestimating it. Why? Partly because there's so much work to do. Naive founders think that it will all get done if they can just hire enough people. Partly because successful startups have lots of #employees, it seems like that's what one does to be successful. The large staffs of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And partly because when founders have slow growth, they don't want to face what is usually the real reason: the #product is not appealing enough. Plus, founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to overhire by the #VCs who funded them. Kill-or-cure strategies are optimal for VCs because the #portfolio effect protects them. VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other. But as a founder, your #incentives are different. You want, above all, to survive. [3] Here's the standard way startups die. They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial #growth. They raise their first round reasonably quickly because the founders seem bright, and the idea sounds plausible. But because the product is only moderately appealing, growth is ok but not great. The founders convince themselves that hiring a bunch of people is the way to boost growth. Their #investors agree.  But (because the product is only moderately appealing), the growth never comes. Now they're rapidly running out of runway. They hope further investment will save them. But because they have high expenses and slow growth, they're now unappealing to investors. The end.