So you know what to build, now what?
Applying the principles of blitzscaling to your company as you hire your very first set of employees, get more users and transition into the “tribe” stage.
Read the first part of this essay here.
John Lilly shared Mozilla’s incredible community-driven growth story a few weeks ago in CS 183C and described Microsoft’s position during that period as a combination of majority market share and dominant distribution. That description has been resonating in my head ever since as it fully captures the essence of where you need to get as you scale your company.
OS-2 or the tribe stage is all about gaining market share by finding your ‘path to scale’. You already have some validation from users and know what the product needs to look like, so it’s time to double down on that path and fully align the startup to its target market.
First thing you need is a growth hypothesis, which basically outlines your strategy to recruit users and can be one or a combination of techniques like virality (Hotmail), word of mouth/organic (Zappos), growth through value (Slack), leveraging community (Mozilla), seeding (for network dependent value proposition like Linkedin, Twitter) etc. Agility is still of prime importance just like the family stage as you are operating in a dynamic environment and so you keep cycling through the plan-execute-learn-rethink cycle.
The next part of the puzzle is to understand what you need to execute this growth strategy and hiring people in those images. Your first hires are the most critical and you implicitly define the culture, values and binding principles of your company by picking the right people.
Industry overvalues experience and strategically undervalues intellectual flexibility. — Eric Schmidt
Being early hires, most of these people need to be generalists that have the ability to quickly gain competency in new areas and get things done. Look for people that are not generic but special in some way. Eric cited an example of hiring CFOs who have gone through bankruptcy as an example case of a special individual who has been through the wars and will do whatever it takes to not let it happen again. Some of these people need to be ‘divas’ that will drive the culture of excellence, probably be controversial and provocative but care passionately about your mission and the company. The best way to get these people involved is to build aspiration by selling the dream!
Armed with a formidable team and a strategy to get market share, you now need to frame a set of consistent questions that you keep asking to track your progress along the way. This is what closes the feedback loop and eventually helps you discover what matters the most for your business and why? Selina Tobaccowala and Mariam Naficy both outlined the importance of building dashboards and metrics around your KPIs to gain these insights and use them to correct your hypothesis.
