The Brightside Playbook: From Product Founder to Marketing-First Mindset

The Brightside Playbook: From Product Founder to Marketing-First Mindset

Your to-do list reveals more about your startup’s future than your pitch deck does. Not what’s on it—what stays on it. The tasks that migrate from Monday to Tuesday to Friday to next week. The ones that feel harder, less intuitive, further from your comfort zone.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Brad Kittredge, CEO & Co-Founder of Brightside, admitted something most founders won’t: his biggest early mistake was letting his natural inclinations dictate his priorities. With two kids under three, limited runway, and the pressure to prove his mental health platform could work, Brad did what felt productive. And that’s exactly what nearly cost him.

The Comfort Zone Tax

Brad came from a product background. When his to-do list had both product tasks and marketing tasks, the choice felt obvious—do what you’re good at first.

“When I look back at what I’ve been good at and not good at, the early marketing is probably what I was not good at,” Brad reflects with the clarity that only hindsight provides.

The pattern was insidious because it felt rational: “When I had items on my to do list that were either like some product or design work or some marketing work, I naturally gravitated towards the product tasks and the marketing tasks kind of stayed on my to do list because they were harder, they were less intuitive to me.”

Think about what this means in practice. Brad would open his laptop each morning with the best intentions. Product work felt satisfying—he could see progress, make decisions, ship features. Marketing felt murky—learning curves, unclear outcomes, constant experimentation. So product got done. Marketing got deferred.

The problem? In those early days, getting product right mattered less than proving anyone would use it. The best-designed mental health platform in the world is worthless if you can’t acquire customers efficiently enough to build a business.

The Hidden Cost of Natural Talent

Here’s what makes founder bias so dangerous: it doesn’t feel like bias. It feels like good judgment. Brad had valid reasons for focusing on product.

Healthcare has higher bars for MVP quality than most industries. “I wanted to really build a great product and sort of my order of operations in my head of solving that big and complicated problem that I laid out was, well, we can only do it if we have a good product and we’re not willing to put anybody at risk. And so the sort of surface area and bar, even for an MVP, is higher than most things you might do. You can’t move fast and break things.”

This is true. In healthcare, you genuinely can’t ship broken experiences. But it’s also a convenient rationalization for avoiding the harder work of building marketing competency.

Brad’s insight cuts to the core: “It required a learning curve, and that was just a mistake. In retrospect, I should have and wish I had, or if I could do it over again, would lean much more into forcing myself to accelerate my marketing learning curve, to get much more adept at that sooner and really understand our funnel instrumentation and our sort of Adwords process to be able to drive better results sooner there.”

The Illusion of Early Success

What made this bias particularly treacherous was that Brad’s initial marketing experiments seemed to work. Sort of.

“I did some keyword testing and I was new to Adwords and so I was doing some very basic stuff, but I saw lots of cheap clicks and sort of account creation and thought, oh, like, oh this isn’t that hard. I’ve got this figured out.”

This is the founder equivalent of learning enough to be dangerous. Cheap clicks feel like progress. Account creation looks like traction. But neither matters if you can’t drive conversions efficiently.

“But, you know, getting to purchases was a lot harder,” Brad admits. The gap between clicks and customers—the part that actually determines if you have a business—required deep marketing expertise he didn’t yet have.

The easy metrics deceived him into thinking he’d solved marketing when he’d barely scratched the surface. Meanwhile, the hard work of understanding funnel dynamics, attribution, cohort behavior, and channel optimization kept getting pushed to next week.

The Forcing Function Framework

Brad’s experience reveals a pattern many technical founders face: the skills that got you to founding aren’t the skills that get you to product-market fit. And your natural inclinations will actively work against developing the skills you actually need.

The solution isn’t just acknowledging this. It’s building forcing functions that override your natural tendencies.

What would Brad do differently? “I should have and wish I had, or if I could do it over again, would lean much more into forcing myself to accelerate my marketing learning curve.”

The key word is “forcing.” Not hoping. Not intending. Not putting it on the to-do list. Creating structures that make it impossible to avoid the uncomfortable work.

This might mean:

• Blocking calendar time for marketing learning when you’re freshest
• Setting leading indicators (tests run, experiments launched) not just lagging ones (customers acquired)
• Getting accountability from advisors or board members on marketing progress
• Hiring marketing expertise earlier, even if it feels premature
• Making marketing competency a personal OKR, not just a company goal

The Regulated Industry Paradox

Brad’s situation was further complicated by operating in healthcare. The higher quality bar for product created a legitimate tension between building something safe and building something marketable.

“I wanted to spend sort of plenty of time on the product, but I knew we also had this pressure to demonstrate some sales so we could raise around,” Brad explains. The pressure was real—he’d agreed with his wife on a timeline, and two kids depended on his ability to earn a paycheck.

This creates a paradox: regulated industries require more product development before launch, but they don’t change the fundamental math that customer acquisition determines survival. The temptation is to hide behind product quality as the constraint. The reality is that marketing incompetence kills more startups than product imperfection.

Brad’s lesson is that even in regulated industries with higher product bars, founders must force themselves to develop marketing competency in parallel. The constraints are real, but they’re not an excuse to avoid the harder learning curve.

The Broader Pattern

What Brad describes isn’t unique to product founders avoiding marketing. It’s the universal founder tendency to do what feels comfortable and defer what feels hard.

Technical founders avoid sales conversations. Sales-oriented founders avoid diving into unit economics. Operations-focused founders avoid strategic positioning work. Everyone gravitates toward their zone of mastery and away from their zone of incompetence.

The tasks that stay on your to-do list—the ones that feel harder, less natural, further from your expertise—are almost always the ones that matter most for your next stage of growth. Your comfort zone is a liability.

The Accountability Question

The challenge is that no one else can see this pattern clearly. Your co-founders see you working hard on product. Your investors see shipping velocity. Your team sees a productive founder. Everyone assumes you’re prioritizing correctly because you’re busy and things are happening.

But busy doesn’t mean effective. Shipping features doesn’t mean building a business. The only person who can see that marketing tasks keep getting deferred is you—and you’re the person most invested in believing you’re making good decisions.

Brad’s honesty about this is rare and valuable. Most founders don’t admit these mistakes until they’ve solved them, if ever. The fact that Brightside succeeded despite this early bias doesn’t make the bias less costly—it makes Brad’s transparency more credible.

The Takeaway

If you’re a founder, look at your to-do list right now. What tasks have been there longest? What keeps getting pushed to next week? What feels harder, less intuitive, further from your expertise?

That’s probably the most important work you’re not doing.

Brad’s lesson is simple but hard: “I should have and wish I had, or if I could do it over again, would lean much more into forcing myself to accelerate my marketing learning curve, to get much more adept at that sooner.”

The work that stays on your list is the work that will determine if your company succeeds. Stop waiting for it to feel easier. Force yourself to learn the non-intuitive skills before your runway runs out.

Your comfort zone is not your friend. It’s the tax you pay for staying where growth isn’t happening.