How to Scale your Startup

How to Scale your Startup

Startups don't change the world if they can't grow and reach many people.

Many startups try to scale without testing if their solution is a minimum viable product and doing the necessary market research and more importantly, the marketing strategy and business planning to ensure the highest probability of success in scaling their startup. 

Entrepreneurs and small business owners whether you are a SaaS startup or any another variety, need to do their homework to scale properly in their vertical. I'm not an expert, but I enjoy thinking about what can help make a startup successful and ultimately scale easier, faster, better. 

Top 25 Tips to Scaling a Startup 


-1- Choosing the right Vertical 

Choosing the right kind of startup, in a vertical that is fast growing and up-and-coming is perhaps the most important variable.

No matter how much talent your startup possesses, no matter how bright your idea or solution, if the market is not favorable, scaling won't succeed because the timing is wrong. You won't find easy adoption if the market audience is too saturated. 

-2- Automation 

Using software to automate different tasks and streamline a variety of workflows to improve cost efficacy and help improve productivity and scale marketing efforts is more important each year.

Startups are corporate cultures that often depend on the solutions of other startups, and in doing so are pioneers of new ways of doing things, experimenting with new time-saving apps and software and more convenient tools is a good idea. 

-3-  Customer Success

Before scaling the product, make sure the product is ready and that major issues of your beta customers are solved, so the product makes the very best first impression on new users where word of mouth, referrals and peer to peer recommendation can help scale the product organically within the target audience. 

Only your customers can tell you if the product is ready, if engagement is not high and time on the solution hasn't reached benchmarks, it would be foolhardy to rush attempting to scale your solution. 

-4- Optimize early Reviews 

Making sure that early reviews on review sites are as favorable as possible, so new customers search your product + review have full confidence to try your product, if there is a free-trial, etc...

Without high quality content and early adoption with stellar reviews, search may not bring significant traffic yet to your website. 

-5- Corporate Office Culture

Before attempt to scale make sure you have the right talent and the most congruent corporate culture possible that translates well to the impression of your audience.

In marketing and as a brand, how happy and engaged your employees are translates into authenticity and a brand vibe that matters to consumers and is immediately recognizable to Millennials. 

-6- Simplify your Unique Selling Point 

Make sure the unique selling point of your product is so simple, anyone can understand it in under five seconds when viewing your website, hearing of your brand for the first time and reading your Marcom and sales pitch.

Simplicity is key here, even if your product does several things well, choose the USP that differentiates your product from the rest and delivers an immediate "ah-ha" moment by the majority of your customers. 

-7- Live in the Cloud and Outsource 

To have an infrastructure and support system that can scale, you don't have to do everything in-house. This will allow you to focus on your startup business where it matters most, and is more cost efficient. 

Using a cloud infrastructure with IT that can scale according to your needs is a must. 

-8- Test and Plan how Each Business Vertical Scales

It's important that in scaling your product, costs, marketing and team that you are segmenting the areas of how to scale and testing to make sure your business strategy assumptions are accurate. 

This requires you understand your business in meticulous details and measure data points objectively, so you are not running simply on instinct and intuition but timing your moves with data. 

-9- Invest in Data Analysis on your Startup

In today's market it's important your business decisions are backed up by data. Therefore, it's in your best interests as early as possible to have an analytics or data-scientist, who is able to collect, interpret and draw key insights about your business, customer base, product engagement, competitor analysis, the market vertical and your sales and marketing data itself.

This data will help you realize if your product is ready to scale and what to tweak before. 

-10- Finding the Right Talent: Think Ahead

Obviously it's a huge challenge for your startup at any point to find the right people. However, when you scale your product it's a critical phase of the startup journey where you may require additional staff.

Being able to anticipate what staff you will require 3 to 6 months from now and start searching well in advance. 

-11- Communicative Actively with your Customers

Knowing what your customers like the most about your product and having a constant stream of feedback from your top beta customers allows you to scale the product in the right direction, while streamlining product features simply that will work in the real world.

Your product development timetable should above all, be in tune with the real needs of your actual customers. 

-12- Focus on the Next Immediate Target

Having starting, mid-level and high-level targets for scaling your customer base allows you to focus on the next goal. Know what is required to reach the next threshold, whether it's your first thousand, hundred thousand or million customers.

Map out the tactics required for each threshold as if you were to go from 0 to a 100 million customers, but always focus on your current targets. 

-13- Adjust Pricing Before you Scale

Understanding how more customers could impact your margins, adjust the pricing and your product pricing packages before you begin to push to scale if necessary. This will allow for a more consistent experience and optimized margins before the bulk of your customers are on-boarded. 

-14- Be Obsessed with Customer-Centricity 

Being in tune with your audience at every level is key, from details of your product, to the visual interface and design, to the content marketing and branding of your startup.

Developing a relationship with your customers and with your audience as a whole requires business development, customer success, IM-chat, and growth-hacking community development. 

Converting your target audience into brand advocates and reaching influencers of your audience is key to reach the new consumer. 

-15- Creative Content

Creative content that's valuable to your audience requires constant innovation, and this is directly building a brand that your customers and future customers can relate to.

Content and social media are still relevant, in some markets more than offers, but also to boost search and discoverability and differentiation as a brand and establishing a more emotional connection with your brand advocates. 

The ROI of creative content cannot just be quantified by lead generation and inbound marketing, but as a brand flavor that makes the relationship of your solution to its audience unique and special. 

-16- Optimize Communication 

Finding the best way to communicate within your startup and externally should be a priority, because this is a key to productivity. Whether to use Slack or not, and checking Email only at specific times per day are examples of how to communicate more effectively.

A team that communicates better, is more efficient and cohesive can scale better and deal with the challenges and added issues that arise. 

-17- Delegate More to Fail Faster

Many Startup CEO and managers don't delegate enough early on especially because they know they are the best at accomplishing a certain task. However, this does not help train your employees to fail fast and learn more, which will come in handy when your startup scales and new challenges overwhelm. 

-18- Diversify and Growth Hack Marketing Efforts

Experimentation is key here with multiple low cost investments and analysis of which method and channels work the best for your startup's marketing development. Without effective marketing to boost inbound lead generation and sales, no startup can effectively scale. 

-19- Hire Talent with the makeup of Future Entrepreneurs 

Well before your startup is ready to scale, you may be hiring entry level staff without considerable experience. Hiring staff with an appetite to learn who can make the most of the startup environment is key. These people have the drive, curiosity and resilience to help you creating a product that has the best potential to scale. 

-20- Use the latest Software and Automation to Manage Leads better

From lead nurturing to retargeting, getting the most from traffic and boosting conversion is key. Creating better landing pages, improving the product video and the conversion rate optimization of the website is part of this, but not all. Building better Email lists, pop-ups to grow your list and starting SMS marketing is as well. 

-21- Don't Scale Prematurely 

Without market fit and the marketing strategy, budget and staff in place, scaling prematurely will can and often will result in a painful failure. Have multiple ways of reaching your largest core audience. Do have personas as to their habits, channels and as much information on them as you can. 

Determine which channels are the highest ROI and have the least friction and how you can improve performance using them. 

-22- Scale Marketing to boost Sales

When the moment is right, marketing campaigns and putting more resources in marketing will be necessary. Content marketing with viral potential has some ability to scale, if you started content marketing early enough and know your audience well enough. 

Referral based programs can help, along with other growth hacking techniques. 

-23- Before you Scale Make Sure your Startup is Sustainable 

When I say sustainable I actually mean that the startup runs well even without the CEO, that is, everyone is on point and keeping the business on track without the need for a conductor, overseer or head manager. The best startups are built to thrive with each employee "growth-hacking" their role to the fullest. 

While this may not always be 100% actual and practical, your startup business should have coherence and momentum, that signals the product, culture and workflow are all ready to grow the business at a faster rate. 

-24- Having Experienced Mentors 

No matter how seasoned an entrepreneur you and your co-founders are, always get second opinions on everything from people who are experienced and can be remain objective and not overly optimistic.

You may be biased after investing your life for the last few months and years, so having consultants and mentors to help you in key areas you are less confident about is essential. This will enable you to know when and how to scale, and gain critical momentum for your business and a better ability to know exactly where you are in the lifecycle of your growing startup.  

-25- Finding the Emotional Hook of your Startup or Product Story 

Relating to customers with a storytelling narrative that elicits emotional responses in your audience is key. Your product isn't just a solution, it's a cultural narrative that interacts with the values and feelings of your audience.

Your product isn't just a bland solution to pain points, it's something new that can ultimately create a better experience for people, value and something to build upon. The emotional customer experience can help scale your startup. 

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Carlo Campisi

Senior Policy Manager at Shakepay | Expert in Strategic Partnerships, Communications & Brand Building | Driving Transformation for Payments Modernization in Canada

8y

Great points and well written as usual.

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Vishwanath Krishnamoorthy

Founder, Consultant, Managing Director at Chevalier Designs, Qualified & Registered Independent Director

8y

Pretty exhaustive set of points.. Well written. I like point 23 the most and feel is most important to take care than to get carried away in the euphoria that start-ups gets surrounded with. My biggest take is that a start can win over established giants so long as it does not behave like a large company (atleast as yet!). Kick away as much indirect labour as possible and ensure direct costs are the only addition in your growth days. Multi-tasking will be important and necessary..

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