The document outlines growth strategies for early-stage startups, emphasizing the importance of targeting high-growth markets and leveraging innovation ecosystems for financing and partnerships. It advocates for a lean and flexible approach to entrepreneurship, prioritizing product development over aggressive marketing while focusing on user engagement to drive growth. Key metrics for monitoring success include revenue growth, active users, and effective multi-channel marketing strategies.

1. Growth Strategy for Early Stage Startups
Alex Gault
Small World Ventures
alex@smallworldventures.com
June 7, 2022

2. Target Markets with High Growth Prospects
❑ A small marketplace that’s growing
rapidly
❑ A large market with an expanding
segment or niche
❑ A large market that’s ripe for
disruption

3. Join Innovation Ecosystem
Participation in an innovation ecosystem can accelerate growth
Becoming a stakeholder in organizations
in any of these 5 categories will give you
access to possible financing, market
intelligence, partnerships and
customers.

4. Variables Which Power Innovation Ecosystems
Source: World Economic Forum

5. Leading Ecosystems
Source: World Economic Forum

6. Make Incremental Advances
❑ Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should
not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to
do something great is suspect, and should be more
humble.
Stay Lean and Flexible
❑ All companies must be “lean,” which is code
for “unplanned.” You should not know what your
business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible.
Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and
treat entrepreneurship as agnostic
experimentation.
Party Like it’s 1999 (Peter Thiel)
Entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned 4 big lessons
from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today:
Improve on the Competition
❑ Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The
only way to know you have a real business is to start
with an already existing customer, so you should
build your company by improving on recognizable
products already offered.
Focus on Product, Not Sales
❑ If your product requires advertising or salespeople
to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is
primarily about product development, not
distribution.
Zero to One, Peter Thiel

7. Growth is about building and optimizing mechanisms
that drive a product’s discovery, adoption and usage.
-- Andrew Chen
Growth -- Strategy
Growth is an after-effect of strong product/market fit
and great distribution.
-- Andrew Chen

8. Growth is a Team Sport
To run the growth process
optimally,
most missions require
cross functional skills

9. Network Effects: Platform Integration
Platforms are reshaping industry ecosystems
❑ If you’re not building a platform, design and optimize your service to
integrate with leading platforms and leverage associated network effects
Industries based on sharing information – which can be digitized
with lower production and distribution costs – are prime for
platform transformation
❑ A high proportion of value from information – Media
❑ Precise, modular output – Retail
❑ Few regulations – Twitter
❑ Spare capacity – Empty passenger seats enabled Uber;
spare rooms created Airbnb

12. Increase Active Users & Accelerate Conversions
Conversion Rate
No other metric so holistically captures as many critical aspects of a website –
user design, usability, performance, convenience, ad effectiveness, net
promoter score, customer satisfaction – all in a single measurement.
– Bill Gurley, Benchmark
Revenue Growth or Active Users
The best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue. The next best, for
startups that aren’t charging initially, is active users. That’s a reasonable proxy
for revenue growth because whenever the startup does start trying to make
money, their revenues will probably be a constant multiple of active users.
– Paul Graham, VC and co-founder of Y Combinator

13. Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy
Channels
SEO
❑ Reach audiences actively engaged in the discovery process of
searching for content relevant to your website
❑ https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/
Paid Search
❑ Highlight relevant content when searches are underway
Social Media
❑ With content and ads, target users whose interests and
preferences are synergistic with your company’s products, value
proposition and messaging

15. Prioritize Content Marketing
Formats
❑ Short form text for social media
❑ Blogs & articles (300-1,500 words)
❑ Stories
❑ Photos
❑ Video
Dashboards
❑ Use a service like the Hootsuite Dashboard for
managing and scheduling content – and
enabling a holistic team distribution strategy

16. Content Marketing Pyramid

17. Match Your Narrative with Industry Trends
Thought Leaders
❑ Create real-time lists (Twitter, Medium, YouTube, Linkedin,
etc) as sources of intelligence regarding your target market
and competition
❑ Share with team members
Common Online Narratives
❑ Examine narratives shared via social media & content
marketing by leading industry brands
❑ Identify common value propositions, pain points & stories

18. Marketing Analytics
Use data to understand:
❑ The best-performing channels
❑ The channels with the highest ROI
❑ How each channel contributes to a
specific goal
❑ The best-converting channels
❑ How your target audience responds
to marketing efforts on each channel
Predict which marketing strategies
deliver the highest results
❑ Customer retention rates by
demographic
❑ Lead scoring – rank sales prospects
❑ Personalized recommendations
❑ Personalized advertising
Tools to Get Started
❑ Think with Google
❑ Facebook For Business

19. Zero to One. Peter Thiel
❑Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing. Andrew Chen
❑andrewchen.com/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an-airbnbcraigslist-case-study
Startup=Growth. Paul Graham
❑www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
Hacking Growth. Sean Ellis
❑How Today’s Fastest Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success
Growth Hacker Marketing. Ryan Holiday
❑ A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising
16 Startup Metrics. Andreessen Horowitz
❑https://a16z.com/2015/08/21/16-metrics
Resources