Growth challenges early stage vs late stage startups

Every startup founder or executive we talk with says: “we need to grow faster”, but if you dive deeper, they don’t all need the same thing.
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In summer 2024 we have talked to 10 early stage startups and 5 scale-ups post product market fit and with substantial revenue, to understand their growth challenges better.

Here are some of the insights from what we have learned.

If you are in early stage:
🔵 growth challenge is essential for survival
🔵 speed has to be prioritized over perfection (often missed by founders)
🔵 choosing a segment to focus on the efforts is a must, most still try “we are for everyone” approach, those who focus - get higher chances to win)
🔵 brand building and SEO seem to be too much of a long shot, and they need faster way to prove hypothesis
🔵 if you get stuck with sales/ acquisition, most times from my experience underlying issue is wrong product positioning (market segment you chose and product features you built to differentiate)
🔵 finding 1-2 working marketing and sales channel is the hardest thing
🔵 if you found it, scaling that growth channel to repeatedly get customers becomes #1 priority.

If you are a scale-up:
🟢 main challenge is expanding business further - horizontally or vertically
🟢 for horizontal growth you need either grow via scaling your current GTM or adding new product lines/ features for the same customer group
🟢 often founders of scaleups are unsure if their marketing works the right way (is the CAC right? Do we miss anything in marketing channels? How much can we improve monetization or qualified lead conversion? etc)
🟢 if scaling further up to enterprise, companies face a massive prioritization issue for engineering and product - how to deliver for a new client and do the SaaS roadmap or how to do B2C and expand to B2B at the same time (spoiler alert - you have to choose!)
🟢 challenge most did not expect is operational / executional excellence - it comes and bites literally everyone (as you grow, business slows down).

We will be tackling each of the key challenges and how to resolve those in the following posts.