The Growth Equation: How Early Stage Startups Can Build a Powerful Engine for Growth

Whether you are focusing on user growth, customer growth, activity, or revenue, we go back to Paul Graham, who generally considers 5–7% Week-on-Week (WoW) growth to be a good indicator of progress, and 10% to be exceptional.

A recent research project⁠2 looking at 70 public companies suggested that in their core growth phase, they were all growing at around 113% per annum or more. As such, if you’ve reached Product-Market Fit, doubling in size each year (or more) seems like a sensible growth target.

usually starts with acquiring their first handful of beta testers and design partners (companies who have agreed to use the product in return for giving you a ton of feedback) to help you iron out the kinks. Once you’re ready to launch, you’re focused on landing your first 100 and then your first 1,000 active users (we’ll go into this further in Ch

Early stage startups struggle to compete on the must-haves and performance improvements, as they generally require a lot of engineering resources. Delighters, on the other hand, are something smaller companies do well. As such, it’s often better to focus on new or emerging markets with slightly lower needs and then excel at the details.

in your first few years, the best advice is to pick one or two North Star metrics (that is, metrics to prioritize rather than trying to achieve everything) and dedicate most of your energy to growing those by 5–10% WoW. With growth like this, you’ll have investors knocking down your door in no time.

While I avoid using too many military metaphors—we’re building companies rather than occupying a territory after all—I do believe identifying a Beachhead Customer is a good strategy. These are customers you believe you have a higher than average chance of securing with the product and resources you currently have. Once you’ve secured these easier-t

The best launches are a series of activities that might take place over 12–18 months. You might find other events like coming out of beta, landing your 100th customer, announcing a successful fundraise, or celebrating a year in business as more impactful—especially if you can rope existing customers into the story. This is where Product Hunt can be

I suggest that founders fall in love with the problem rather than the solution and talk to potential users before they are too settled on a particular idea.

Your goal here is to create a list of all the people you know, all the communities you can join, all the influencers you can connect with, and all the locations you can find where your users might spend time, and then use this and the basis of connecting with and landing your first 100 users. And once you’ve done that, you need to do it again to ge

Most of the early stage acquisition techniques we discussed in the previous chapter fall into either the sales or marketing camp. While I’m a huge fan of Product-Led Growth—a technique that leverages existing usage to generate new usage—you’re still going to need early users for your Product-Led activities to work. As a result, Product-Led companie