Before Growth

Investors advising early-stage teams should avoid pushing for growth ahead of product/market fit. As an industry, we all know that this ends in disaster, yet the pressure for premature growth is still all too common. Startups need time and space to find their fit and launch the right way.

- Get the product right then focus on growth - get your team to think in terms of fact and hypothesis. " - Growth isn’t just spending money it’s figuring out how to create a flywheel that will generate word of mouth marketing. - Get your shortlist about your first users and learn everything about them and begin to market.

I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch. I occasionally meet founders who seem to believe startups are projectiles rather than powered aircraft, and that they'll make it big if and only if they're launched with sufficient initial velocity. They want to launch simultaneously in 8 different publications, ... See more

Sam Altman on why you shouldn’t track absolute user growth in the early days of a startup “Nothing but a great product will save you; you can get everything else right and it still won’t work.” He points out that almost all startup founders get the following wrong: “It is more… Show more

Once you know your product actually makes your service 10x better along some dimension, then grow. Don’t fall prey to temptation (or pressure from your investors) to grow before then.

"This is one of the most common mistakes among new product teams when I ask "How does your product grow?" The answer is typically a long list of turbo boosts. It is typically because there is no hypothesis on what the growth engine is, and as a result they are compensating by trying to cobble together a lot of little things." - Brian Balfour (Found... See more

1. Most founders are bad at growth, so if you're amazing at it, the advantage is significant. Consider: Most startups die not because founders are bad or products suck, but because they couldn't figure out how to get anyone to try them.

When you’re an early stage startup, your most important job is to get clarity on what you’re building. When your product is buggy and low quality and the first mile of the product is ignored (the welcome/tour, the onboarding, the explanatory copy, the empty states), you won’t know if the poor retention numbers are due to a bad product or a bad mark... See more