Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

McLeod: Companies should win one market at a time over broad expansion

Justin McLeod · Advice Line with Justin McLeod of Hinge · Jul 17, 2025 · at 12:30

Justin McLeod, founder of Hinge, advises an early-stage founder against spreading resources across 20 markets instead of achieving depth in one market before moving to the next.

0:00 / 0:31exact quote · 31.5s
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“Yeah, and we have this principle at Hinge of kind of depth over breadth, and we always You know, it's hard to try to cover up for weakness by just like expanding more like, oh, like that market's not working. Let's just launch more markets. So thinking, thinking like, okay, we got one market going. How do we get our second market going? Like what's the next ripest interesting market? And then putting all your focus there, getting the learnings and then launching your third market versus kind of launching 20 markets and then suddenly realizing you spread yourself so thin and you're, you've got like 20 different markets kind of working.”

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