Entrepreneur

12.MY GROWTH PHASES

The Marmer phases include (i) discovery, (ii) validation, (iii) efficiency, (iv) scaling, (v) maintenance and (vi) sale or renewal. It is important to realize that start-ups going through phases 1–4 should not try to be small versions of large companies. Instead they must be completely different from large companies and they should master rapid organizational changes as they move from phase to phase. In this chapter, we will discuss the transitions that a growth company goes through and how you deal with them.

Babies and teenagers are not just small or young versions of adults, they are completely different. The same applies to young and small versus old and big companies. We will now study this. Let's start with the discovery phase. In this phase you should, as mentioned, primarily identify your product/market fit. An interesting definition of this is given by serial entrepreneur Sean Ellis. It goes as follows:¹

‘In my experience, you should, to achieve a product/market fit, have at least 40 percent of your customers saying that they would be very disappointed without your product. Certainly, this threshold is a bit arbitrary, but I defined this by looking at the following comparison of results across nearly 100 start-ups. Those who had problems with demand were always below 40 percent, while most who received strong traction exceeded 40 percent.’

So a product/market fit means that many customers are very pleased with the product and would be disappointed ...