In over 20 years of building startups using data to create effective, repeatable strategies for growth, I’ve learned that each path is unique to each business. The biggest mistake any entrepreneur can make is abandoning what they know to be true about their own business to follow someone else’s can’t-miss growth plan.
If you can build your startup into a viable business, you have everything you need to create traction and scale that business.
Here’s how to do that.
If you want to scale, let data be your light in the dark
I’ve seen it a million times: A founder will build a startup to some initial success point and then freeze — unsure of exactly why their customers are so enamoured with their product or service.
I wrote a post outlining the most critical mistakes startup founders and leaders make when faced with the task of scaling their initial success. Most of the time, those founders and leaders have the right idea — using data as a guide to determine the direction and magnitude of their next move. The problem is almost always in the execution:
- Keeping too tight a grip on that initial success and letting new opportunities slip away.
- Listening to the wrong signals and chasing unproven theories.
- Letting an abundance of optimism or pessimism cloud the decision-making process.
Anyone can tell you that you should be using data as your light in the dark for growth. So how do you make sure that you’re using it properly? I’ll cover the DON’Ts I wrote about in the previous post and give you actionable strategies to execute instead.
DON’T: Ride any wave too long
The biggest mistake a startup founder or leader can make is to analyze all the data around the company’s initial success, look at only the positives, and decide to stay the course. Nothing lasts forever, all good things must come to an end, and if your business is growing, there is no upper limit on where your numbers should be.
DO: Always be experimenting
You should be in a constant state of controlled experimentation with your product, your positioning, your market fit, your pitch, and your messaging. You don’t need wholesale changes with every new version or change, but you do need to take several steps into the darkness to see if you’re going to stub your toe, so to speak.
From the previous post, a reader asked: How much time should I devote to creating reportable data from an MVP? My answer is “All of it,” or at least as much time as you can. An MVP without a tracking mechanism on every interaction, from the initial discovery of the business to close the sale, is just a very expensive way to fumble around in the dark.
It doesn’t matter if you’re selling SaaS software or gardening tools. Every touchpoint in the discovery, transaction, and usage of that product should be tracked, automatically or manually, including when the interaction happened, how it happened, what the result or next step was, and what that result or next step means to revenue and costs.
You should track every data point and let the results sort themselves out. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked a founder if they were tracking a data point and the answer was no and the reason was they didn’t feel like they needed it.