Growth Stage Overview

Congratulations on your progress! From here, we’ll help you follow a process for fueling your company’s continued growth.

After all, a minimum viable income is great, but it won’t buy those gluten free crackers, pay for college for the kids, or fund all of that adventurous travel you love so much 🙂

Here’s a little overview of where we are:

  1. You’ve hit your minimum viable income number — you’re earning enough money that you wouldn’t go searching for another job if you were fired or quit today.
  2. You’ve reached some level of product-market fit — your customers find value in your product and it has helped fuel the growth of your company to this point.
  3. Now it’s time to build a sustainable growth engine to develop your “minimum viable business” into a full-fledged company.

Metrics & milestones

A good growth process starts with metrics and milestones.

  • Metrics are the things you measure. What you choose to measure matters. We’ll talk about what metrics matter and how to get the data you need.
  • Milestones are the growth targets you’ll set every so often to get from here to there — these could be revenue or customer goals, but they always focus on getting bigger and better.

Once your milestones are set, we’ll help you consider possibilities for growth, including making your current marketing more effective, finding new marketing channels, and/or building new products. You’ll evaluate potential growth opportunities based on your hypothesis about their ROI. Then you’ll run experiments to test your hypotheses to find the most promising results before going all in on one channel.

Focus is key in reaching milestones — one or two channels is usually plenty to get you from where you are today to the next milestone on the path.

And when you hit that next milestone, we’ll run the process again — evaluate your metrics, set new milestone goals, brainstorm new growth opportunities, experiment to find the best ones, and then focus.

This is the growth “flywheel,” as business author Jim Collins puts it, and it can fuel the growth of your company until you decide to sell, scale, or shut down.

So that is where we turn our attention to now: getting the flywheel turning. And it starts with understanding your current metrics. Let’s go.

Stage 8: Growth