A To-do List for Startup Growth
Since I joined this game, I worked directly on business growth — not the growth on a product point of view, but grow the GMV month over month. Luckily, I got to work for several startups at different stages in marketing and business operation. A pre-A early-stage startups, 2 series Cs, and a late-stage one who got acquired by a tech tycoon. Working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week at these startups make me feel pretty fulfilled and recently I realized I can put some of them into a picture, just like playing with jigsaw puzzles.
A curious kido now has a picture, and she’s trying to dig deeper on each piece of the puzzle everyday. Along this journey, I’d like to exchange my thoughts on growth strategies and challenges my team met at each stage of startups with your adventurous ideas and audacious experiments.
Stage I: Testing testing.
Budget: $80K
Time period: 6–9 mon
MAU: 15k
Once the website/app is ready, getting some users to try the product and figuring out the product market fit quickly is essential. My list for this testing stage is as below.
#1. Launch at least 5 3-day acquisition campaigns in the first month to figure out the most efficient approaches and target audience. $15K
#2. Go deeper on the top-3 performing campaigns on the second month to enlarge seed users. $10K
#3. Pivot the product to cater to the seed users on the third month.
#4. Host a launch campaign to get as much media coverage as possible. $15K
#5. Run. $40K
Challenges:
#1. Can’t get enough budget as planned.
#2. Focus switches between ROI and user base.
#3. Media attribution is chaotic.
#4. Campaign plan got changed constantly so campaigns can’t get delivered on time.
Stage II: Double down the victory
Budget: $400K
Time period: 9–12 mon
MAU: 60k
GMV: $5M
Now we have a pool of seed users. Utilizing suitable content for each media and promotional campaigns to get the brand out on the market is an efficient way to grow the business. My breakdowns of this stage involves below steps.
#1. Test and pick one consistent branding message/selling point in different format on corresponding media and build it up. $80K
#2. Overarching promotions and incentives for new users. $150k
#3. A community of your loyal seed users to spread the word to their friends. $40k
#4. Continue to find growth opportunities by 3-day acquisition campaigns. $80K
#5. Run. $50K
Challenges:
#1. The branding message gets changed constantly and the team wants to present more than one selling point at this stage.
#2. Can’t run enough promotional campaigns as planned. Or run promotional campaigns on a lower and less frequent level.
#3. Get distracted by your competitors in the market.
#4. Continuous conflicts when it comes to prioritizing new functions for business growth or fundamental product maintenance and attribution/data analysis system.
Stage III: Grow like a rocket
Budget: $1.5M
Time period: 9–12 mon
MAU: 200k
GMV: $30M
Quickly scaling up and beat your competitors to new area of the business.
1. Run at least 3 cross-over campaigns each month with strategic brand or media partners for merchandise and new traffic. $100K
2. Build up at least 2 new business units with service or category to attract new users/functionality. $100K
3. Leverage paid performance campaigns from 5% to 15% — Expand your focus from the top 3 performing area to the top 5; Extend the targeting segments $500K
4. Create annually integrated campaigns for more brand awareness and new users $500k.
5. Run. $300k
Challenges:
1. Lots of team members leave due to conflicts between personal career goals and company goals.
2. Multiple optimization plans from actionable insights can’t be executed because the supply chain/engineer team capacity can’t meet the requirement.
3. The growth priority and approaches limited or influenced by the background of the C-level team.
4. Fierce competition from big players in the industry. Competitors who have much bigger budget and resource would copy your new ideas quickly.
Stage IV: Optimization
Sean Ellis’s new book introduces growth hacking approaches and illustrates successful cases in tech industry.
