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.

Emailing people out of the blue is likely to lead to a fairly low response rate. As such, modern sales teams will typically put together some sort of sales sequence. A sales sequence is the series of steps you’re going to take when reaching out to somebody. On LinkedIn, this might be visiting their profile, reading or liking a few articles they’ve

The idea around content marketing is super simple: Create useful content that connects with your core audience’s needs and either educates, entertains, or hits a nerve in some way.

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

This includes activities like warming up your network; creating social media assets, website banners, an impressive launch video, and an upcoming page;⁠4 scheduling announcements; and generally building up buzz. Consider joining online communities of potential users, other founders, and potential hunters and anywhere else you can go to help promote

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.

As such, if you have an existing ICP written down somewhere I’d review that document now to make sure you have a clearly articulated Beachhead Customer. And if you haven’t written something down yet, do so now.

The easiest way to do this is to listen to how your existing customers describe your product. It often amazes me how rarely founders really understand what they’ve built. They’ll have many rather mechanistic assumptions about who will use their product and where the value comes from.