Scaling up: The Sky Is The Limit?
•
7 likes•1,831 views
Down to earth advice to avoid crashing your scale-up. This presentation was given by Toon Vanagt on the Tech Startup Day in Brussels on 18/02/2016. Cautionary tale to not scale-up before your startup has reached true product/market fit.
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to Scaling up: The Sky Is The Limit?
Similar to Scaling up: The Sky Is The Limit? (20)
More from Toon Vanagt
More from Toon Vanagt (7)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Scaling up: The Sky Is The Limit?
- 1. Scaling up: the sky is the limit? Down to earth advice to avoid crashing your scale-up Toon Vanagt - @Toon Co-founder casius.com, data.be,leanfund.com lex.be
- 2. The degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand… Validate product/market fit
- 3. 1999: Casius.com founders Raised and “burned” > 4M€ in next 3 years
- 4. • Timing is everything (first dot.com bubble) • Tiny % of a huge market seems solid ground for business plan, but is very hard to reach • Cash is more important than your mother! • Cultural & legal aspects matter & differ accross Europe too Lessons
- 5. • Burned 4.000.000 EUR of VC money to build a 1.850.000 EUR turnover business… • Chicken-Egg dilemma when you need to build 2 sided markets. • Off-line marketing is a very expensive way to convert on-line leads • Human ressources are a crucial bottle neck, but also your core asset • Unfocussed: lots of money in the bank makes it very hard to kill your darlings, cut fancy features and skip your fancy wishlist More expensive lessons
- 6. Premature scaling? Stresses startup’s ability to execute
- 7. That scale up button I will not hit Before I reach product market fit
- 8. • Eyeballs • Visitors • Retweets • Likes • Exposure • Downloads Don’t get blinded by vanity metrics
- 10. Retention & repeat usage metrics matter • Active users • Engagement • Customers • MRR • CAC • Churn • Marketing & process automation
- 11. It takes hard work & lots of capital to ‘squeeze’ those leads UP in order to attract, win & keep customers! Gravity does not apply to your sales funnel!
- 13. Business data Annual account summary Graphics say more than a thousand numbers
- 14. Business data Notify on changes & find similar prospects based on company age, location, size and industry Notify on changes in customer data
- 15. Full-Text search Across 2 501 818 company publications Filtered search Entity recognition 30% “StartMeUp” discount*
- 16. The sky is not the limit. Your imagination is. @Toon