My three founder hacks from product to scale

Even after building a great product for a big 
market, one challenge remains: to properly adapt 
the operation as quickly as the business grows. 
There is no single playbook for that.

Crossing the chasm from product to scale depends 
on a growth mindset, a flexible operation, and 
the right data to drive decision making.

Here's how I see it.        

My three founder hacks from product to scale

There are countless playbooks on how to market, sell, build, grow, and fund your startup, but scaling up a business is complex, shady, and lonely. It is about crossing that chasm beyond your product's early adopters and go all the way up to win the market, burning less capital than competitors and yet providing even more value to customers. That's the path to real scalability (though still limited by the constraints of the business model you pursue).

If only things were so simple... because the real world for most founders is forever taken by a constant storm of daily problems, issues, failures, and interruptions. Swamped by the technical and management debt, both gradually growing. Founders do know what needs fixing, but just can't take the time to fix it. They do hire new people, but don't trust them enough to delegate (yet). They promised to be home before midnight, but again... they're still stuck in the office.

Sounds familiar? I've been through that nightmare as well, but I came up with three hacks that always got me out of that mess. They are not everything you need, but I have repeatedly helped other founders exercise those hacks. When done right, they strongly shorten a founder's journey from product to scale.

I'll describe them briefly to make better use of your reading time.

Hack 1: Have a Growth Mindset

Most pre-growth investors say they'd rather invest in an A team with a B product than in an A product led by not-so-great founders. Experienced VCs aim for an additional layer: they seek to invest in coachable founders.

The best founders I've worked with are extremely productive. They would call me out of the blue with complex questions, and I'd better be ready to point out an useful path towards the answer. They would devour a full book in a couple of days, code two or three experiments then come back with answers I didn't anticipate. I love those interactions because the founder's demand for fresh perspectives makes me a better investor and we can learn together no matter who's right or wrong.

Effort, challenge, failure, feedback, and persistence are the essence of a growth mindset.

From the thousands of founders I've met, the most coachable ones sistematically exercise those practices with themselves and others.

Hack 1 will create a strong foundation for hacks 2 and 3.

Hack 2: Build a Flexible Operation

Each startup is unique. Each operation is very specific and will reflect its founders' personality, productivity, and values. The same business model led by different founders may require completely different company architectures over time. Look at the structure of the startup you're running today: it will be way different in two to three years... and you are definitely not sure how its internal structure will be in the future.

This happens because when startups grow fast, they tend to evolve incrementally. Teams scale horizontally, based on functional cells or squads, replicating practices and inspiring similar actions on other teams. Besides that, a new hierarchy layer will pop here and there to allow for occasional new leadership, frequently creating an unbalanced structure all over the company. That is not the proper way to grow, because roles, people, hierarchy, and processes get all mixed up over time. Hands down, horizontal growth and forced vertical shifts will poorly drive the evolution of your startup's organizational chart.

The solution is to design a flexible operation from scratch, elastic enough to be easily molded through time. While this is a hard task for inexperienced founders, you can dramatically improve by asking serial founders for feedback. In fact, it became a full playbook in CxO's product-to-scale framework.

The hack to build a flexible and agile operation is to envision your organizational chart as far in the future as you feel capable, with a hypothetical team of hundreds of people and a hundred million dollars in revenue. How would it look like, and what would be the best format? Invest at least a dozen hours to lapidate that projection considering your present business model and others you're tempted to approach. Then bring the chart back to the present moment, greying out all teams and areas that are not presently needed or not yet able to deliver.

Use that simplified, regressed chart as the foundation for today, and adjust towards that future vision over time by hiring people, automating work or even redesigning specific areas of the future chart. Prioritize growth and hires to know which new teams to activate, fill up the grey areas according to demand, and gradually build towards scale. Do that instead of drastically redesigning your company every year, or adding intuitive boxes to enclose pieces of your operation just because unpredicted growth compels you to.

Hack 3: Trust the data

CxO was not founded to scale in the traditional way, but it does have a scalable design behind it. It's not a business to reach massive recurring revenue, but an engine that creates data and time. When we meet in person, I'll be happy to explain what the heck that means.

The undeniable truth for both you and me is this: the faster your startup grows, your strategy will be constantly shifting. The only one way to know where to shift and how much is to make decisions based on factual, indisputable data, and be extremely conscious on which data to use.

Going from product to scale, you must first pick the drivers of your business model and define the metrics you'll fall in love with (if you're not familiar with the north star metric, here's a recent review). Make sure you automate how those metrics (and their composing metrics) are collected, stored, and displayed. If your company grows as expected, you'll need them ready all the time and sooner than you think.

As an example, forget vanity metrics like homepage visitors or social media followers - focus on the conversion rate of website visitors as qualified leads, or the return on ad spend of a social media campaign. You will be constantly distracted by various operation metrics demanding your attention - even so, make sure you pick the right ones to rely on.

Trusting the right data will never let you down, and will show you the constant pulse of your business as it grows.

Know your scale kung-fu

My three hacks are not enough to scale up a startup, but please give some thought to understand how those hacks make sense to you. They are obvious in their essence, but are not sistematically practiced by many (or even comprehended by a few). I created the CxO operation report so founders would have a fast, end to end perspective on their operation based on a sample of data already available. I have designed it as a simple way to kickstart the planning towards scale.

Intuition plays a major role in execution, but the best results come from the right data reinforcing or redirecting intuition (this is the essence of validation). Constant validation will positively guide a fluid mind and agile operation to reach scale, because data allows you to read your surroundings and adapt as fast as possible. Since each startup is different and the process may burn you out, you must sistematically practice and develop your own kung-fu to reach scale.

So be like water ;)