#62 The moment I knew I needed help

There's a specific feeling I've started to recognize.

It's not burnout exactly. It's more like standing in the middle of a room where every surface has something on it, and you're still adding things to the pile.

Over the past few months, my team shipped a partner integration launch, an incrementality playbook, OOH campaigns, a keynote, a sales deck, a hiring push, and a dozen other things I'm probably forgetting. All with a lean team. All in parallel.

And at some point in the middle of all of it, I had a moment of clarity: this isn't a capacity problem. It's a signal.

What small teams actually teach you

Running lean forces prioritization in a way that larger teams don't. You can't do everything, so you get very good at figuring out what actually moves the business. Every project has to justify its spot on the roadmap.

It also forces you to build systems fast. When you're the only one who knows how something works, it breaks the moment you're out. So you document. You templatize. You make things replicable before they become a liability.

What I've noticed is that the constraint is often what produces the sharpest output. When there's no budget for polish, you get direct. When there's no time for 3 rounds of review, you build better judgment.

But there's a ceiling.

The moment that changed my thinking

It wasn't a single bad week. It was more of a pattern I couldn't ignore. The things I kept deprioritizing were always the same things: community, always-on social, deeper content. Not because they weren't important. Because I knew they needed someone who could own them fully, not someone squeezing them in at 9pm.

That's the real signal. Not "I'm overwhelmed." It's: "I know exactly what we're leaving on the table, and I can see the person who should be doing it."

The tactical version

A few things that helped in the meantime:

Anchor on output, not hours. When you're lean, time tracking is a trap. What actually matters is whether the right things shipped. Judge yourself by output, not effort.

Pick your forcing functions. External deadlines (launches, events, campaigns) are underrated as prioritization tools. They force hard calls about what's actually ready and what isn't.

Build in leverage. Every piece of content that takes you 3 hours should ideally produce 3 assets. The blog becomes the newsletter. The newsletter becomes the LinkedIn post. The LinkedIn post becomes the email. If it doesn't compound, think twice before building it.

Name what you're not doing. I started keeping a running doc of things we were explicitly deprioritizing and why. It also became the clearest argument for headcount I ever made.

We're hiring

If any of this resonated, it's probably because you've felt it too.

I'm building out the Vibe marketing team and have two roles open right now. Both are for people who think in systems, write well, and actually understand what AI fluency means in practice.

• Product Marketing Manager for someone who wants to ship sales enablement content and positioning statements.

• Marketing Manager, Content and Growth for someone who can move fast across content formats and tie it back to pipeline.

Both roles are based in NYC.

If that sounds like you or someone you know, reply to this email or find the listings on LinkedIn.