Outsourcing before you understand what you’re buying is costing founders a lot. It’s a marketing spend trap that often catches early-stage founders, but it can be avoided.
What’s happening: Performance marketer and UNTMD founder Maria Kathopoulis says she once outsourced key business functions before fully understanding them, making it difficult to judge what she was actually buying. She says this is common among early-stage founders, but increasingly avoidable.
Why this matters: Understanding enough to ask the right questions is not the same as doing the work yourself. It is the difference between an informed buyer and an expensive one.
“The best founders I work with don’t run their own campaigns. But they understand them. And as a result, they get significantly better outcomes from the people they hire.”
Maria Kathopoulis, Founder and CMO, UNTMD
Maria Kathopoulis lost $250,000 before she understood what she was buying. Not through recklessness, she is clear about that. But through the gap that exists for almost every early-stage founder between the language of the services being sold and the ability to evaluate whether those services are actually delivering.
“I was building a business in an environment where everyone sounded credible, everything looked sophisticated, and I didn’t yet have the technical fluency to separate signal from noise,” she writes. “That gap cost me a quarter of a million dollars.”
The pattern she describes is consistent with what CB Insights has found tracking startup failures over more than a decade. No market need accounts for 42% of failures. Running out of cash accounts for 29%. Not bad products or weak founders. Strategic and capital misallocation.
In her early years, Kathopoulis signed retainers she did not fully understand, approved strategies she could not properly interrogate, and relied on reports that looked polished but did not connect clearly to revenue. The problem was not outsourcing. It was outsourcing blindly.
“Without a baseline understanding, you don’t know what good looks like,” she writes. “You don’t know what questions to ask. You don’t know when something is underperforming versus when it simply sounds complex. So you default to trust. And trust, in this context, is expensive.”
Why the system rewards the gap
The business services ecosystem, Kathopoulis argues, is structurally profitable when there is a gap between what is being sold and what is being understood. Forrester research found that nearly two thirds of marketing leaders do not trust their own measurement, and 61% say their analytics are not aligned with their growth objectives. If experienced marketing leaders cannot evaluate performance with confidence, early-stage founders rarely stand a chance.
When a founder cannot evaluate performance independently, the burden of proof shifts. It moves from measurable outcomes to perceived effort. More activity. More reports. More language. But not necessarily more results.
Of the hundreds of founders Kathopoulis has spoken to about their first major outsourcing decision, the number who could define what success looked like before they signed was, in her words, in the single digits. “So they pay for learning through loss.”
The turning point
After losing $250,000, Kathopoulis made a decision she describes as changing everything. She stopped outsourcing anything she did not understand, not permanently, but until she had enough baseline knowledge to evaluate it properly.
She taught herself Meta advertising, Google Ads, SEO, conversion tracking, attribution, CRM systems and AI tools. Not theoretically. Operationally.
“The more I understood, the less I spent,” she writes. “Not because I stopped investing in marketing. But because I started investing with precision. I could spot inefficiencies quickly. I could challenge assumptions. I could distinguish between strategy and execution. I could see where money was being wasted. And most importantly, I became much harder to sell to.”
forresThe barriers to building that understanding have collapsed further since. McKinsey’s 2024 State of AI research found that 78% of organisations now use AI in at least one business function. Kathopoulis argues the founders getting the most leverage are not just using AI to automate. They are using it to understand, to reverse-engineer campaigns, interrogate data, and compress what would previously have taken months of costly trial and error into a few deliberate weeks.
What to do differently
Kathopoulis is direct that the solution is not to do everything yourself. The goal, she argues, is to become an informed buyer rather than the operator.
“The best founders I work with now don’t run their own campaigns. But they understand them. They know what metrics matter. They know how to read performance. They know how to ask the right questions. And as a result, they get significantly better outcomes from the people they hire.”
Her practical recommendation is to spend the first 60 to 90 days before any major outsourcing decision learning the fundamentals of whatever is about to be invested in. Not exhaustively. Just enough to understand how it works, how it is measured, and what good looks like. Then hire. And when you do, measure everything against outcomes that tie directly to revenue, not impressions, clicks or activity.
“Losing $250,000 was painful,” she writes. “But the more painful part was realising it was avoidable. The scale of it, the duration of it, and the lack of control. That came down to one thing. I didn’t understand what I was buying.”
Maria Kathopoulis is Founder and CMO of UNTMD, a performance marketing agency specialising in digital growth for DTC, SaaS and service brands.
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