Welcome to The Memo by Vecto.
In this edition, we explore a really fun juncture in any founder’s journey: the part when you realize the difference between firing up your gut instincts to make decisions, and the right time to fire those very same instincts.
Let’s dig in.
When you have known your best friend for years, you know exactly what makes them tick. You know their likes and dislikes, their favourite colour, their insecurities, and what not to get them for their birthday.
When you have a bangin’ butter chicken at a new restaurant, you know they’re going to love it and make a mental note to come back with them.
You’re always deeply connected to them no matter where you both live.
You’ll feel the same way about your first 100 customers. You know what made them buy your product, what made them come back, and what made them refer you to their friends.
Because you took the time to ask, you know how they shop, what makes them click on Checkout, or contact CS instead.
Because you’ve read every single piece of feedback, you know who will be mad about the pack size changing, and who’s going to notice the purple on the packaging has gone from deep to mauve. You’re so deeply connected to them because they saw your product when no one else had. It drove you to work harder and do better for them.
You’ll see a trend here: all these relationships operate on a healthy dose of gut feelings, recency bias, and your bandwidth to navigate the initial chaos from 0 to PMF.
All the ‘data’ you gathered sharpened your intuition of what will work vs what won’t.
After all, it’s your idea and reputation on the line. You learn to rely on your intuition, especially when market data is scarce or doesn't exist.
As your sales have grown, this gut-ability shifts. You’re spending more time talking to investors, hiring everyone from coordinators to managers and leaders. Earlier, you’d spend time on the Ops floor packing boxes or handling customer calls, but now you rely on automated reports.
Moving past pure intuition like this is a natural step toward building business maturity.
So what happens to your gut instincts? Do they go away?
Of course not!
Do they pivot to bigger things? Yes. Yes, as they should.
Scaling Intuition: Is it even possible?
Can you simply copy-paste strategy during geographic or operational expansion?
Case Study #1 - Making regional culture your Lightsaber
Recently, I spoke with a Singapore-based founder expanding operations into Bangkok and Manila. In the SG incubator days, this founder hired their core team over coffee chats or beers. They relied on a gut feeling of shared energy.
During expansion, they hired a country lead in the Philippines with the same approach. The method had worked previously, after all. They met a great candidate who was polite, showed major enthusiasm, and agreed on the vision.
The founder's instinct ruled it a perfect fit, and they made an offer the next day.
Once the candidate onboarded, regional cultural norms around hierarchy and loyalty crept in. The team shared all the relevant information, flew them to Singapore for team bonding, and made expectations clear.
Yet, two months later, nothing moved. The new business was stagnant.
Three months later, the founder realized this wasn’t going to work. They respected the person, but the professional alignment was simply not there. They realised that everything they had mutually agreed on in the interview was a sign of respect for authority, rather than actual strategic alignment.
On the other side, the country lead was lost without an objective process and was uncomfortable challenging targets when they seemed unrealistic.
Case Study #2 - The Market Leader Overconfidence
In my early career, I was a project manager at an NGO where we deployed water filtration plants in villages that didn’t have access to clean drinking water. The initial two-year pilot had been a huge success in our home state through sheer hustle, constant supervision, and the NGO’s goodwill networks.
This initiative had rightfully become the feather in the NGO’s hat.
Soon there were funding requests from NRIs who wanted to sponsor a plant in their own villages in other states as a way of giving back to where they came from.
For the first round of expansion, our Ops playbook and project metrics were ready. We hired for feet-on-ground type of roles to work with our new local partners in these new states.
Six months later, we learnt that each state and district has entirely different vendor payment cycles. On top of that, legacy relationship networks dictated trade credit terms and our new entity lacked both: the runway to wait on payments, and established networks.
We had relied on our home state knowledge and success, and suddenly our projects took twice as long because working capital remained locked in unpaid invoices.
Eventually, each site took twice as long and we learnt our lesson.
When you expand your business in a new land, intuition fails because the cultural machinery is invisible to outsiders. To design clarity, you must move beyond gut and intent.
You need to activate a brand new design-thinking filter.
Whenever your company faces a cross-border expansion milestone, run your decisions through this three-part structural filter:
Listen and Learn
Get your feet on the ground. Beyond plain conversations, look at the physical or regulatory constraints of the new market. Before you hire anyone, speak to local founders. Show up at local events and interact with competitors to understand delivery and service quality expectations.
Know (humbly) that every territory has its own beauty that your hustle cannot change in the short term. Map these into your plans before you allocate expansion capital.
In the Philippines, statutory compliance timelines, local banking integrations, and labor laws follow their own paths. In India, logistics networks rely on localized transport unions.
If your growth plan assumes your home-market timeline and behaviour, your system design is flawed.
Clarify the Decision Rights
Unclear decision rights create recurring conflict between headquarters and local execution teams. When expanding from Singapore to Manila, you must explicitly define who owns what.
Does the local team have the authority to alter product pricing based on local collections data? Or does the Singapore HQ hold that right?
If HQ uses the “we always do it like this” card to overrule what colleagues are seeing in real time, coordination and trust will break.
Run the 100-Person Fairness Test
Around this time, your startup is likely to grow past the first 100 employees. At this stage, personally-designed policies will begin to crack. In a small team, you can make good-faith agreements with employees or vendors based on gut feelings.
At scale, this starts to look like bias.
Ask yourself: Can this decision be written into a company-wide policy? Does it always apply, or does it depend on operational mood?
True system design means building a framework that delivers fair, consistent results even when you are not in the same timezone.
Structure vs Speed
Many startups believe they are protecting growth speed by avoiding structure. They worry that bringing in systems or rules will mean they’re losing their special spark.
Can a structured decision filter slow down your initial response time? Perhaps.
Can it feel frustrating to a founder who is used to moving fast? Definitely.
Can a structure provide any benefit? 100%
Good systems create predictable, repeatable outcomes ensuring your vision has the wings it needs to fly.
The regional expansion or the hiring process may take longer to execute, but when you’ve got a basic foundation in place, the only way is up.
Before I sign off.
What decisions do you find yourself constantly doing a gut-check on?
And how often have you done it in the past week or month?
Reply and let me know.
Until next time,
Shweta.