Growth gets better with age
You hear startup stories everyday about how someone went from nothing, to being huge in no time at all. These are always great to hear, but if you pull back the curtain there is a lot more to it than just that quick win.
Even the stories that everyone talks about like Slack - they started in 2013, didn’t actually launch any product for 2 years, then quickly started gaining free users, but took quite a bit longer before the sales started rolling in. That certainly wasn’t an overnight success, but they do indeed set the bar on growth.
The mindset companies have on growth typically fall into two rather distinct buckets:
The Visionaries - that are full of grand ideas and are the go big or go home type. There are usually a lot of moving pieces in their growth plan, that if they all don’t fall in at the perfect time, in the perfect order, in the perfect place -> there will be no success.
The Realists - that have big ideas, but realize that in order to get there it takes time and each step builds on top of the other to drive the growth that is needed.
When it comes to driving growth in your business the point is to not try and skip all of the steps to get to the “end” all at once. Yes - we can all agree it would be amazing to go from $0->$1B in 6 months, but that realistically is not going to happen.
Here are a few strategies that we’ve seen work well to help businesses continually drive substantial growth over time:
Anything is better than nothing - the website doesn’t need to be perfect, the logo can suck, the email can confuse people - but you need to do something. Get to 80% done and go for it, the worst that happens if someone points out a flaw and you fix it, not a big deal.
Ask for and listen to feedback - when you’re moving quickly there are things you’ll do wrong (see #1) and also things you’ll miss. Continually ask for and be open to feedback to make the process better for the next person. But be sure not to just disregard feedback, that doesn’t help anyone.
You’re never done - great the conversion rate improved 25% or sales are up 50%. Okay good job… now go do that again to get another 30% improvement.
Focus on continually pushing forward and you will get where you want to go. Don’t give up!
“It’s easy to dream about it… Much harder to execute it… Work!”
~Gary Vaynerchuk
