Early Stage Startup Self Growth Assessment
After helping hundreds of companies understand how growth hacking fits into their business, our team has compiled our learnings and offer 5 questions for early stage startups to consider when getting started or improving an approach to sustainable growth.
The 5 Questions:
To set up your team and product for success, we recommend asking the following questions about your own company. We’ve recommended resources from the GrowthHackers Community as well as our own team’s experience to help guide you through answering each question.
Keep in mind that it’s much easier to shape the culture of your organization for growth when you’re still a relatively small team with no preexisting department silos. Taking time to explore these questions now will help you lay the foundations for a growth-oriented culture.
If you have any questions (or suggestions for improvement), feel free to leave them in the comments below.
Have you validated Product Market Fit?
Product Market Fit is the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand and is foundational for growth.
At this company stage, it’s most important for a team to focus on validating your product as a must-have for customers prior to transitioning to growth.
Many people have the misconception that they can “growth hack” their way to product/market fit. Trying to do this is generally very frustrating, expensive and unsustainable. Read more →
Have you instrumented for growth?
It’s difficult to improve something if you haven’t started measuring it. You need event tracking on both an aggregate and individual user level to identify customer patterns, problems, and opportunities for new experiments.
Improvement in your product starts with understanding what your customers are doing (and not doing). You don’t need a lot of tools to get started, but you do need visibility into the customer journey from acquisition through the entire funnel. Read more →
Have you identified a North Star Metric?
A North Star Metric is the single company-wide success metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to customers. Identifying this metric and optimizing your company’s efforts to grow this metric is key to driving sustainable growth across your full customer base.
If you’re having a hard time identifying what this North Star Metric is, you’ll likely want to dig deeper into validating what value you truly do provide to customers to ensure you’re focusing your team on something sustainable. Read more →
Is your team aligned with a weekly growth meeting?
A growth meeting is very important for keeping the team accountable for the inputs that accelerate your growth rate (outputs). Meeting regularly will also help your team share learnings and get into the habit running a growth process. Read more →
Are you experimenting around high impact objectives?
As a small team, it will be important to align the team around the biggest area of opportunity and focus your testing efforts there. Read more →
As you validate product market fit and progress through these questions, NorthStar by GrowthHackers (free for companies under 20 employees) can help you manage the testing process more effectively and align your team on the metrics matter most to accelerate your growth.
Special thanks to Sean Ellis & Anuj Adhiya for contributing to this self assessment.
