How to grow your early-stage startup

- and who to bring in to make it happen

I am lucky to be able to speak to a lot of startups via Seedcamp and a few other places, where the same few problems / challenges come up again and again. This is one of them, hope my thoughts are helpful.

Today I had a few quick calls with founders as part of my EIR duties at Seedcamp and on one particular call — an energetic and very smart founder who had contacted me to talk about marketing and growth — it seems I was able to impact his thinking about growth.

The startup have a great product, it works really well and solves a real need for their customers. They are are at $13k MRR and growing at around 20% a month, but that 20% is coming from free app store distribution and will not scale. They had been testing the water with investors who feedback that they want to see more growth (As they always do).

I made some quick assumptions to check with the founder. I paraphrase:

Me: Your are a product team that is dev heavy with some design skills and you built the product in house?
Him: Yep.

Me: You are thinking you need to start doing sales and marketing now that you have the product working well?
Him: Yep.

Me: But you are dev team so you don’t really know what to do?
Him: Yep.

Me: You are thinking of getting a marketing person and a sales person?
Him: Shit that is, spooky

Me: Yep, everyone makes the same mistakes. You are doing it wrong, but don’t worry, we can fix it.

The thing is, it’s completely normal for startups to start structuring themselves like businesses at such an early stage, the only problem is, it’s the opposite of what they should be doing do.

A startup’s job is to be an entity that can find the answers and build every stage of their funnel — that is where growth comes from.

‘Product’ is a part of that, ‘Marketing’ or ‘Sales’ is normally a part of that; but the creation of the funnel itself, is the job of the Startup, not the execution once it is created — and so, ‘Growth’ is not marketing or sales.

Growth is instead, a holistic understanding of the funnel that turns potential customers/users into retained active, paying users.

Growth is calling your free tier users and asking for ‘feedback’ but really SPIN selling them to your paid plan;

Growth is documenting those calls and adding the same cues to Facebook with remarking ads;

Growth is building a ‘yelp for *your industry*’ clone so that you can get people to claim profiles;

Growth is iterating on your emails to churned users with improved copy/timing/CTA’s;

Growth is A/B testing your ads until the CAC makes sense;

Growth is improving the copy on your landing pages to better correlate with the language that your users use;

Growth is improving how premium features are shown / interacted with in your layout, so as to improve conversion.

Growth is testing pricing models so you can charge the most to the types of customers that will take it.

Just like building a great product, all of these things take time testing and iteration. Lots of it.

The foundering team of a startup, therefore, needs to deeply understand their funnel from beginning to end.

They need to theorize solutions for every stage of that funnel, build tests to find out if those solutions are correct and get everyone in the startup working on finding the answer to whatever has been decided is the most important question at the moment; repeating that cycle until the all the answers are known and all the funnel bottlenecks are removed.

In other words, the people needed at a startup are the people who can find out the answers, and the founding team must lead that. Unfortunately the people who are great at finding out answers and creating the solution are rarely the the same people who are great at executing — a salesperson is usually great at selling, but not great at building a sales funnel and a developer is usually great a writing code, but regularly lousy at building product.

Scrap that ‘go-to-market’ strategy, and stop looking for that sales person.

Instead:

1. Define your funnel based on Dave’s thing
2. Define the goals for your company as a whole (use OKR’s) and at each stage of the funnel
3. Come up with all potential ideas/projects to move those metrics
4. Ruthlessly prioritize the potential solutions based on impact/importance and ease of implementation and confidence
5. Test the ideas in the quickest way possible to find find out if they work , what they would look like, and increase confidence (Be happy with failed tests — learning is progress)
6. Implement the process / product that comes of step 5
7. If that process requires defined repeatable execution, find people to run it (That is when you bring in sales people to sell or developers to build integrators etc)
8. Keep repeating the cycle until you have a business model working repeatably and at scale
9. Congratulations, you are now no longer a startup.

So, as to who to bring in to make that happen? Not people who want to take on the results of step 7. Once a process is repeatable, they are the great executers to execute it but before then, the bring in people who have the rounded skillset, ability and want to work on all steps 1–9 with you.

Peace

Andrew

Ps. I built a process to manage all of this stuff, with the working title of ‘1-Person-Method’. I will be publishing it at some point. Follow me here to see it when I do, and let me know if you have any thoughts on the title?