- The Growth Recipe
- Posts
- Why speed is your best friend
My friend saw the title of this email and he instantly told me "You sure you want to use that as your title” while having a big grin on his face.
Yeah, grow up, James.
Okay, anyway, so what I mean is that SPEED in start-ups is crucial.
The name of the game in SaaS is growth.
In these times it’s about cost-effective revenue growth. 2023 heading to 2024, you have to do it efficiently. Especially as you need to:
Ability to invest in the product
Profitability / Ability to Raise
Hire and attract the best talent
The thing is, scaling is hard work, no doubt about it. What makes it hard is that everyone is blending in with one another in a market where only 3% are ready to buy right now.
Every software category is just insanely competitive now. Software is cheaper than ever to make and GTM is more expensive than ever to execute.
When you couple that with all the marketing channels out there 👇
You need to not just stand out but execute effectively.
The list above is not a marketing strategy but just a list of tactics where companies try to get this running all at once.
They can’t get any results out of any of it because they’re not dedicating enough time to make effective use of the channels. Spreading themselves too thin.
You need focus and speed as this will be your unfair advantage.
You need to identify where you think there is the best opportunity for growth.
Look at what you’re competitors are doing and see where they are getting a lot of their growth, talk to people in your industry/space and try to understand what are the playbooks.
It varies depending on who you are going after, so hone in on the channels that you’re most comfortable about.
How to think about growth:
1. Owned (Branded):
Creation/management of branded content and digital assets (blogs, podcasts, websites, communities, and social media channels)
Pros: Building a brand and solid organic traffic can greatly offset a lot of marketing spend.
Cons: Building this takes time, consistent effort and patience.
2. Earned
This focuses on gaining exposure through external sources and collaborations. (PR, content collaborations, webinars, podcast appearances)
Pros: Cost-Effective. They often require minimal investment. Being featured by reputable sources can boost your brand's credibility and authority in your space.
Cons: It can take a lot of time. Building relationships and securing earned opportunities can be time-consuming.
3. Paid
Investing in advertising, such as social media ads and search ads.
Pros: Direct Results. When executed effectively, paid strategies can provide immediate, measurable results, delivering a clear ROI over time. It’s also scalable. You can scale paid campaigns to match your budget and goals.
Cons: The Dependency. It ceases to generate results when you stop spending, making it financially intensive in the long run. Viability - testing to determine which channels are most effective can be a costly trial-and-error process.
4. Growth Loops
Leveraging existing traffic and customer base to generate further growth. (referrals, new subscriber sign-up flows, content sharing)
Pros: You’re maximising resources by to extracting more value from your existing audience, reducing the need for continuous customer acquisition efforts. When established, it can fuel sustained growth without exhausting your budget.
Cons: It can take a while to figure out. Implementing may require a learning curve, and it can take time to fine-tune them for optimal results.
Doing this as quickly as possible
The best way to approach this is to start doing bets on the channels you’re most comfortable with.
Choose around 8 channels and do one at a time. Gain momentum, and understand the playbook and the ins and outs before moving on to the next.
Slowly in time, you will have all 8 working for you.
The quicker you figure them out, the quicker you can move to the next channel.
What works well is having the team run in sprints
(it can be weeks or months, it doesn’t matter) 👇
The focus is figuring out the channel and moving it to the stable category where you can continue to run and start tackling the next one.
The quicker you get through the learnings, the failures etc. the quicker you can find the channels that are producing results and move on to the next.
Lastly…remember, most of your marketing will fail
Embrace failure as learning: understand that failures are valuable data points in your marketing journey. they bring you closer to discovering what truly works.
Limit the impact: fail fast, fail cheap by experimenting with smaller, controlled tests to limit the risks of failures. use data to pivot quickly if needed. Doesn't have to be costly if done quickly and at an appropriate scale.
Idea pipeline: keep a diverse backlog of ideas, prioritise them based on potential impact, and be ready to adapt and experiment with unconventional concepts.
There you have it. Hopefully, this gives you some insight into how to focus and speed your superpower to grow faster.
Remember to also try and stand out with your marketing, don’t blend in with everyone else. Rethink your creatives, offer and positioning and you’ll be all set!
Till next time, speak to you soon.
-Rachid 👨🍳