Lessons learned - Startup #growth
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The document discusses lessons learned about startup growth, emphasizing that 74% of high-growth internet startups fail due to premature scaling. It highlights specific areas where startups commonly scale too quickly, including team, technology, finances, products, and customer acquisition. The author encourages startups to practice brutal honesty, transparency, and community involvement while navigating growth and potential pivots.
Lessons learned - Startup #growth
- 1. Lessons learned about startup #growth Johann Romefort, Tech Evangelist @Stylight
- 2. Premature scaling will kill your startup
- 3. Premature Scaling 1. 74% of high growth internet startups fail due to premature scaling. 2. No startup that scaled prematurely passed the 100,000 user mark. 3. Startups that scale properly grow about 20 times faster than startups that scale prematurely. 4. 93% of startups that scale prematurely never break the $100k revenue per month threshold 70% of the startups are scaling prematurely Source: Startup Genome Report - Data based on an analysis of about 3200 high growth internet startups
- 5. Growing your team too fast
- 6. Examples of team premature scaling... Hiring too many people too early Hiring specialist before you need them Hiring managers instead of doers Creating too much hierarchy
- 9. Examples of technological premature scaling Building an infrastructure to support a million people Using exotic tech stack for the sake of it Be on the cutting edge of technology Building too generic, just “in case…”
- 10. Over- or under- scaling your financials
- 11. Examples of financial mistakes ● Raising too little money to get through the valley of death (tip: read “Crossing the Chasm”) ● Raising too much money: ○ You’ll lose focus and start to aim at all directions ○ Investors will expect more growth than you can deliver ○ You’ll have the impression that you have “time” when you don’t
- 13. How to bloat up your product? ● Growing on a hunch and scattered feedback ● Adding features because they are “nice to have” ○ => Less is more ● Adding feature X because it might get you this client who’s asking for it ● Entering partnerships without measuring their impact on your roadmap
- 15. Customer acquisition overscaling examples Spending too much time on customer acquisition before market fit Overcompensating missing product/market fit with a lot of marketing, press and partnerships
- 16. Measure and Challenge ● Without a compass you will get lost at sea ● Challenge every decision - do we *really* need this or that? ● What can you test fast and for cheap?
- 17. The OODA Loop
- 18. What did we do right?
- 19. Brutal honesty with our investors If they are good investors they are here to support you in hard times They will find out if you’re not doing well Don’t hide behind vanity metrics
- 20. Brutal transparency with your customers We built a public roadmap we involved our customers in the process The also shared their brutal feedback with us But, be careful: Listen to trends, not to individual feedback even from so-called “thought leaders”...
- 22. Building the story of your company with everyone
- 23. Build a strong online presence through storytelling ● Use Medium to share the stories of your company ● Start developer marketing early - it will help to scale your engineer team when you need it => Blog, going to meetup, etc… ● Get involved in your local community
- 27. Should I pivot or not? ● Listen to your investors and get their support ● Can you reuse the technology you already built? ● Do you know the new market you want to address enough?
- 28. Final Words...
- 29. PAY IT FORWARD