Monzo went from zero to a million customers in two and a half years without spending a single pound on advertising. Its founder walked away before it hit 8 million, because the alternative was not surviving the company he built.
In a talk at YC, Tom Blomfield walks through both of his companies, GoCardless and Monzo, and what emerges is a repeatable playbook: the word-of-mouth engine, the launch-in-months approach, the reason he chose the hardest possible problem on purpose.
And, in the same breath, the part investors never want a founder to run: the burnout math.
I broke the whole thing down so you can steal the growth moves and recognize the warning signs before they hit you.
Inside you will find:
How a Tarpit Idea Became GoCardless
Why Blomfield Left a Company He Loved
How Monzo Hit a Million Customers With Zero Ad Spend
Why Picking a Harder Problem Is a Growth Channel
What Going All-In Actually Cost Him
The Burnout Math Investors Don’t Want to Hear
What to Steal From Blomfield
Launch your site faster than ever with Framer - now with Agents that make every part of your workflow effortless
Framer is the pro website builder for creators, teams, and businesses that care enough to get every detail right. Now with Agents that work alongside you across the full website workflow: designing new pages, managing your CMS, editing content, and adding SEO all without leaving the tool where the real site lives. Trusted by teams at companies like Miro and Perplexity.
Agents bring speed and scale; you bring taste, judgment, and control. Together you can:
**Build and iterate faster:**generate sections, refine layout and styling, and ship updates in minutes.**Scale content with confidence:**update CMS collections, localize copy, and keep metadata consistent across pages.**Stay production‑ready:**reviewable changes, collaboration, and safeguards that help teams ship without handoffs.
This issue is available exclusively to paid subscribers!
Paid subscribers unlock the full library: 200+ decks, 10,000+ investors, AI Agent playbooks, and fresh high-signal content every week.
Here’s a good place to start:
🤖 AI Agent Templates
↳ The McKinsey Slide Playbook for Claude — how to build consulting-grade presentations in minutes.
📈 Startup Playbooks
↳ The AI Founders Playbook — lessons from Sequoia, OpenAI, Nvidia, and LangChain on building AI startups from zero.
🎯 The Deck Library
↳ 27 Most Promising AI Startup Pitch Decks Backed by Top Investors — the best-funded AI startups of 2025, slide by slide.
💰 Investor Database & Tools
↳ The Family Office List — 1,000 family offices actively writing cheques. Used by 5,000+ founders raising their round.
Not subscribed yet? Try it free for 7 days and unlock this guide, plus our full premium library:
We’re already 70,000+ founders and operators inside!
Let’s begin!
