Building a startup growth strategy from scratch

Typically, entrepreneurs start with overwhelming drive and determination. However, this often leads to them to create a startup in an intellectual vacuum and without the broader commercial knowledge of how startups work, grow and scale.

For example, you may have the following questions running through your mind: How can I hack growth? What channels should I use? Should I use digital advertising? How does SEO really work? Yet, you may be pursuing the answers without any previous experience.

That’s OK, we’re here to help. Of course, the answers to these questions are complex, as they depend on so many factors about your idea. However, irrespective of what you’re creating, the following process will help you to establish the answers yourself, quickly and without any investment.

You may not realise it now, but if you are to succeed, then you are likely to be categorised as ‘another one of those’. This is because the success stories guide the way all startups are developed.

So, with this in mind, we recommend that you put together a list of the businesses that you admire and read into their backgrounds, founding stories, investment rounds and so on. If you have the time, then perhaps you can watch the following 10 minute video. We’ve analysed 100 of the most successful businesses that probably inspired you to want to become an entrepreneur. Within it, we cover nine questions to establish the similarities and differences between them. Alternatively, we’ve summarised the findings here.

Our analysis of 100 success stories clearly shows that there isn’t one route to success. If there was then all these businesses, and particularly those pursuing similar goals, would have chosen similar paths.

With this in mind, it’s important to establish the common themes between them. Our analysis reveals that five aspects can be defined as markers of whether a startup will be successful or not as presented in the video below.

You may have realised by now that working in a startup is relentless. This focus and dedication is essential, but it can easily lead to a complete lack of understanding of how the customers you’re appealing to feel.

This is only natural as the more time you spend building the business, the less time you have to feel and think like a customer outside of work. To counter this, you’re quickly at risk of over-emphasising or wrongly appraising the limited traffic reaching your website.

Moving beyond this, it can be great exercise to consider the mindset of the people that you’re looking to appeal to. Using behavioural models, such as how they’re likely to perceive the purchase in the video below, can test your assumptions and inspire creativity.

Once you realise that customers don’t circle around your business, the aim is decide on the most appropriate way to become a lasting part of their lives. If you truly have something worth offering, then will be open to hearing about it, but only if you find and appropriate way to approach them. After all, we are all bombarded with thousands, if not millions, of marketing messages each day.

One of the critical errors many startups make is that they believe there is a standard playbook for growth hacking. Invariably, the vast majority of the time, this involves creating a cost per acquisition approach through ads. However, if you watch our analysis of proven growth hacks, you’ll consider this very differently.

So, if you’ve clearly profiled the customer, you’ll be able to seek out the tactics of other businesses that have successfully attracted similar customers.

As an entrepreneur, one of the most valuable skills is time management. You’ll have to make daily decisions on how best to complete an extensive to-do list. After all, you’re likely to be up against businesses with marketing budgets in the millions.

One of the most essential parts of this is selecting the right tools and services to help you. There are hundreds of tools and services for productivity and data analysis that can help you to complete tasks in a fraction of the time.

It’s therefore worth setting out a list of activities that you’re likely to need to do regularly and considering how much time they’ll take before searching for appropriate tools.