Jamil Alhidiq on Why early-stage startups need growth operators who can build, not just strategize

For most of the last decade, an early-stage company hiring for growth had a familiar choice. It could hire a strategist who would define the audience, the positioning and the plan, and then hand that plan to agencies, freelancers and tools. Or it could hire a channel specialist, someone excellent at paid social or email or search, and hope the rest of the funnel kept up.

Both models assume that the expensive part of go-to-market is deciding what to do, and that the doing can be bought. That assumption has weakened.

Where the work has moved

The tools a small team uses to find and contact customers have become programmable. Prospect lists can be built and scored automatically. Research into a company's likely problems can be drafted by a model before anyone writes an email. Follow-up can be triggered by behaviour rather than by someone remembering. Each of these is a system that has to be designed, connected to the others and maintained, and each one breaks in ways a slide deck does not anticipate: a domain without proper email authentication lands in spam, a duplicate record gets contacted twice, an enrichment step quietly returns nothing.

The result is that much of the real decision-making in early go-to-market now happens inside the systems. Who qualifies as a prospect is a scoring rule. What the first message says is a prompt and a template. When to follow up is a workflow. A strategy that cannot be expressed in those terms is a strategy someone else will reinterpret, usually without saying so.

The case for the builder

Jamil Alhidiq, a go-to-market operator who works between Chicago and Los Angeles and leads GTM at Privatus, describes his own role as bridging the gap between building a product and building a business. His career runs through luxury real estate marketing in Beverly Hills, bilingual paid campaigns for international property buyers and, more recently, automated outbound systems that move from prospect discovery through qualification, research and personalised outreach.

The argument his path makes is practical. In a company of five or ten people there is rarely a handoff that works. The person who decides the ideal customer profile is often the person who has to turn it into a list, write the first email, cut the video ad and notice when the reply rate drops. An operator who can only do the first of those steps creates a queue. One who can do all of them creates a loop, and loops are what early-stage go-to-market is made of: try a message, measure it, change it, try again.

Creative is part of the system too

The same applies to creative. Short-form video and paid social reward volume and iteration, and a team that has to brief an outside producer for every variation tests a handful of ideas a quarter. An operator who can script, shoot and edit tests them weekly. The hook in the first two seconds of a video is as much a conversion variable as the subject line of an email, and it benefits from being owned by the same person who sees the downstream numbers.

What it does not replace

None of this makes strategy optional. A well-built system pointed at the wrong customer reaches the wrong people efficiently. Alhidiq's own advice to early teams is the oldest in the field: talk to customers early. The point is not that building matters more than understanding the market. It is that, at an early stage, the person who understands the market increasingly has to be able to build the machinery that acts on that understanding, because there is no one further down the line to hand it to.

For founders hiring their first growth person, that suggests a different question from the usual one. Not which channel a candidate has mastered, but what they have built that found a customer.