The Startup Playbook, 2nd Edition

Chapter 30Scaling the Company

Will and I (Rajat) have been fortunate to have a number of companies reach the scale-up phase. There's no doubt that it is a major milestone to reach this stage. Of course, this stage has its own challenges and “playbook,” if you will.

Especially in the modern era of entrepreneurship, there are more resources, people, and investors that have been through this phase. While this book is coming to a close, that doesn't mean that your entrepreneurial journey is. In fact, the scale-up phase can be just as exciting as the start-up phase, albeit very different.

Recently, our company JumpCloud reached this milestone, and we are now in the midst of this part of the journey. At this stage, we are continuing to build out the management team, finding more customers, and implementing systems that will help us scale, such as financial and billing tools.

Before we started to aggressively scale the company, we spent a great deal of time to ensure that the signals we were getting were legitimate. Perhaps the most important was product-market fit. We knew that if customers were purchasing regularly and sticking with the product over the long-term, we could be ready to scale. We also made sure that we could add customers cost-effectively and once we confirmed this, we knew it was time.

Luckily, at JumpCloud we were able to find an excellent financial partner in General Atlantic to help us take the company to the next level. We also have recruited additional team ...