The campaign you keep showing your team ran in that company’s seventh year.
They had three hundred people. A category that already existed, because they had spent five years creating it. A finance team, a brand team, and enough money in the bank that a quarter of wasted spend was an annoyance rather than an extinction event.
You are in year two with nine people.
What you are looking at is the victory lap. You are trying to copy it as though it were the climb, and the reason it produces nothing when you run it is not that you executed it badly.
The tactic was an output, not an input
This is the whole argument and it generalises well beyond Estonia.
When a company with distribution runs a brand campaign, the campaign is a consequence of having distribution. It is what you do once enough people already know who you are that reminding them is efficient. It did not create the position. It expressed one.
Copy the expression without the position and you have bought a costume.
So the test for any tactic you are about to copy, and it takes thirty seconds: what did that company have on the day they did this? Headcount, capital, existing customers, category awareness, a sales team. Write the four numbers down. If you cannot match any of them, you are not running their play. You are running a different play that happens to look similar in a screenshot.
The examples you learn from are the exceptions, structurally
Here is the fact that reframed this for me.
The top ten employers in the Estonian startup sector account for around 45% of all sector jobs, with Wise at roughly two thousand people and Bolt at over thirteen hundred.
Nearly half the accumulated working experience in this ecosystem sits inside ten companies. Which means the stories, the conference talks, the podcast episodes and the advice your investors relay are overwhelmingly generated by organisations that are structurally unlike yours, and were unlike yours even when they were your size, because they were raising at a moment that no longer exists.
None of that is a criticism of those companies. They earned every bit of it and the country is better for them. It is a statement about your sample. You are learning from the survivors of a different game, and the lessons arrive stripped of the conditions that made them work.
What genuinely does not transfer
Be specific, because vagueness here is how founders talk themselves back into it.
Brand campaigns. They need frequency to work, frequency needs budget, and below a threshold you are buying a handful of impressions that nobody remembers.
Category creation. Teaching a market that a new kind of product should exist is the most expensive marketing there is. It took Pipedrive and Wise years with capital behind them. If your plan requires the market to learn a new concept before it can buy, you have chosen a problem you cannot afford.
A content team. Two writers producing four posts a week is a machine that needs an audience to feed. You do not have one yet.
Hiring a VP of marketing to figure it out. At nine people, this is a founder outsourcing the thing they have not yet worked out themselves, and it fails roughly every time.
Multi-market launch. Three countries at once is three half-efforts. One market properly beats three simultaneously, and the Nordic entry work I went through separately is a full job on its own.
The rebrand. A new logo has never once fixed a distribution problem, and everybody reading this knows a company that tried.
What does transfer, and why
The transferable part is unglamorous, which is precisely why it does not make it into the talks.
Narrowing until it hurts. Every one of those companies was absurdly specific at the start. Not a payments platform, a way for one kind of person to send money to one other country without being robbed on the spread. Narrow is free and it is the only advantage available at nine people.
The founder doing sales personally, for longer than is comfortable. Not because founders are better salespeople, but because they are the only ones who can change the product in response to what they hear on the call.
Individual customer contact at a volume that feels excessive. Twenty conversations a week, not a survey. This transfers perfectly because it costs time rather than money, and it is the input that generated most of what you admire.
Speed of response. A nine person company can answer in an hour. A two thousand person company cannot. This is a genuine structural advantage and most small companies squander it entirely.
One channel, funded properly. The thing a small budget can actually buy is depth in one place. Picking the wrong one is recoverable. Spreading across five is not.
Notice what those five have in common. They are all inputs. They produce a position rather than expressing one.
The second cargo cult, which I should be fair about
There is a mirror image of this mistake and it is now nearly as common.
“Do things that don’t scale” has become its own recited doctrine, and it gets used as permission to never build a system. Founders hand-holding every customer in year four, refusing to write documentation, treating the absence of process as a virtue rather than a stage.
The unscalable phase has an expiry date. The signal that you have reached it is specific: you are turning down customers because you cannot serve them, or the same question is being answered manually for the eleventh time, or the founder is the bottleneck on something that no longer teaches them anything.
At that point the correct move genuinely is to build the machine. The mistake is building it in year one because a company in year seven has one.
The thing that makes this urgent now
Funding has tightened hard. Published trackers put Estonian equity funding in the first half of 2026 down by roughly two thirds against the same period a year earlier, across nine rounds rather than twenty nine.
Which matters here for one reason. The capital-intensive tactics were always the wrong copy for a small company, but there used to be a path where a round arrived and made them briefly affordable. That path is narrower now, and the money that paid for deferring distribution work is not coming back on the old terms.
Where I come out
Stop asking what the successful companies do. Ask what they did when they were your size, which is a completely different question and one that almost nobody puts on a slide because the answer is boring.
The honest version is usually: the founders talked to an unreasonable number of customers, refused to serve most of the market, and shipped changes faster than anyone larger could.
That is available to you this week and it costs nothing except the willingness to do something that will not look impressive in an investor update. Which is the actual reason it gets skipped.
My notes on what I work on cover the rest. If you’d like to think through your own stage, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat. I’m contracted full time so this isn’t a pitch.