Scaling Up: 19 Practical Ways to Drive Growth in Your Early Stage Startup
The journey from scrappy startup to rapidly scaling company brings immense growing pains. Laying the right foundations in your early days is crucial to facilitate smooth expansion later on.
Follow these 19 tips to help your early stage startup scale faster:
Product
**1. Boost Your Viral Coefficients ** Make virality a priority in your product design. Enable existing users to easily invite teammates or share your solution across their companies. Also provide free editions allowing broader access. Even slightly viral products compound growth significantly over time through word-of-mouth.
2. Centralize Knowledge in Help Centers and Wikis Create internal wikis and public help centers to share knowledge across the organization and users. This enables convenient self-service, taking load off your human support team. Central repositories also preserve institutional knowledge as you scale.
3. Formalize Product Processes for Roadmapping and Releases Standardize your roadmapping, prioritization frameworks, and release processes so product innovation continues efficiently. Codified processes allow you to build predictably on top of organized systems as your offering and team balloons.
4. Get Compliant on Security and Regulations Upfront Address compliance needs like data protection proactively rather than racing to catch up down the line. Build in security, regulatory requirements, and accessibility from the start. It's cheaper to bake these in early rather than retrofitting.
Marketing
5. Produce Relevant Content Consistently Content that targets your ideal customers drives organic growth long-term. Write blog posts, guides, and videos that address your audience's pain points and showcase how you solve them. Use SEO to help prospects discover your knowledge. It works slowly but surely.
6. Engage in Top Events in Your Industry Events let you engage prospects face-to-face. Attending the biggest ones in your space (like SaaStr Annual) connects you with concentrated groups of potential buyers. Get tactical to capture promising leads or customers. Big conferences offer unique access if handled effectively. Remember, you don’t have to exhibit or sponsor. Early on, get creative - Get some ideas from this article, Standing Out at Conferences on a Big Budget: Clever Tactics to Get Noticed
7. Implement Drip Campaign Nurturing Launch drip marketing like email sequences as soon as you have any sign-ups. Nurture new leads since many won't convert right away. Drip campaigns keep your brand top of mind and convey ongoing value after sign-up. This brings back "warm" prospects later on.
8. Enable Live Contact Through Phone and Chat Don't hide behind forms - make it easy for prospects to talk to real people. Put a phone number on your site and dedicate resources to answer. The option for live contact builds trust and improves conversion rates. Chat is great, but voice conversations help deals progress.
9. Build Strategic Partnerships to Expand Reach Pursue partnerships with players serving similar audiences to get access to new channels early on. Integrate with relevant platforms. Co-marketing brings new users from partners' existing communities. This magnifies your reach.
Sales
10. Hire at Least 2 Sales Reps Initially When hiring your first salespeople, bringing on just one rep won't provide enough data to determine what's working or not. Hire two reps (or more if you can afford it) with similar experience levels to benchmark performance. With a solo rep, you can't discern if results are due to the product, market fit, their process, or other factors. More data points allow you to optimize.
11. Don't Expect Sales Magic Immediately Early reps likely won't produce massive results immediately. Plan to close your first 10-20 customers yourself before leveraging reps to accelerate. Give new hires thorough onboarding and reasonable ramp time before expecting significant impact. Avoid handing off sales completely - maintain involvement selling yourself.
12. Have Everyone do Customer Support Nothing builds first-hand customer understanding like doing support. Have all roles, including engineers and sales reps, regularly handle some support tickets or calls. This quickly surfaces pain points and product gaps to address in development. Rotating support democratizes insights.
13. Speak with Customers Directly Regularly Make time each month for calls, Zooms or in-person meetings with customers, no matter how small. Direct conversations reveal needs and feedback surveys alone miss. Look for patterns in multiple customers with similar attributes to uncover wider opportunities
14. Specialize Support by Customer Segment Customize onboarding and support experiences for key customer segments like SMBs or enterprises. Meet specific use cases by vertical. Tailored support increases adoption and retention within the niches you target. Don't take one-size-fits-all approaches.
Leadership
15. Invest in Leadership Development Early Rapid hiring strains management bandwidth. Implement executive training and mentoring early to skill up leaders before exponential team growth. Set managers up for success guiding larger organizations.
16. Empower through autonomy Enable your team to operate independently in their domains by clearly defining responsibilities and objectives, then getting out of their way. This breeds innovation, ownership, and capacity to scale impact.
17. Role Model Grit and Resilience As a leader, adopting a mindset of perseverance in the face of obstacles inspires your team to push through challenges. Displaying calm resolve during setbacks sets the tone.
18. Communicate Vision Clearly Consistently reinforcing the broader vision and rallying cry gives your team purpose and clarity. This connectivity to the "why" incentivizes their best work.
19. Invest in Mentorship Guiding mentoring relationships between senior and junior team members accelerates professional development. Knowledge transfer also reduces dependency on founders.
Laying these strong foundations from the beginning stages allows your startup to scale smoothly, not chaotically. Use these strategies to accelerate your growth trajectory.
4th November 2023