scale up

Your goal as a startup is to make something users love. Once that’s done, then figure out a way to get a lot more users. But this is critical. If you fail in this, you will fail. The startup graveyard is littered with people who think they can skip the step. It is much better to first make a product which a small number of users love than a product that a large number of users like. For any entrepreneur, it becomes harder when he tries to scale up things and move up with the growth graph. There are numerous examples of startups which take off with great gusto, but ended up abruptly, failing to sustain a continuous growth graph.

To have a successful startup, you need a great idea in accordance to the market, a great team, a great product, great execution and 30 other great things to “scale up” your startup.

  1. Hire few and make sure they are world-class enthusiasts. You may even consider paying them more as they would be getting more work done than a huge team with almost average people.
  2. Three questions that you must ask your recent hires: What should we start doing to scale up? What should we stop doing? What should we keep doing to scale up?
  3. The cost of a bad hire is 15X his or her salary.
  4. Four questions leaders should ask clients in person and not merely on a survey: How are you doing? What trend is going on in our industry? What do you hear about our competitors? How are we doing?
  5. No team is so big that it can’t be fed with two pizzas.
  6. Eliminate time wastage on activities that don’t add value to your customers or clients.
  7. Formulate strange culture and strategy to differentiate your firm in the marketplace. Plus double assure that the strangeness is being lucrative to the firm and work culture.
  8. To scale up, hire people who are better than you.
  9. Heads of business should lead as if they are individual CEOs.
  10. It is better to do three to four hours of interview instead of spending hours of headaches for having hired the wrong candidate.
  11. Failure to develop sufficient leadership is one of the biggest barriers to growth.
  12. Great managers discover what is different about people and capitalize on it.
  13. On boarding needs to be a celebration. Throw a party for people who join the company instead of doing it when they leave.
  14. Modern careers are like rock climbing where top doesn’t have to be the goal, setting benchmarks in a different domain should be.
  15. Deadlines cannot be an excuse for making mistakes. Be quick but don’t hurry.
  16. A company can outperform rivals if it can establish a difference that it can preserve.
  17. If everyone can accomplish one thing in addition to his or her daily job, that’s a dozen improvements.
  18. Being cognizant about the trend is going to shake up your industry.
  19. Senior leaders need to be in the market 80% of the week.
  20. Share insights from conversations with clients at the executive team’s weekly huddle.
  21. Among all competitors, the one who beats the Marketing Intelligence of the rest, wins.
  22. Have a coach for all executives and managers, in order to hold them accountable for behavioral changes.
  23. Most matters can wait for the daily huddle or the weekly meeting. Bigger issues, which necessitate getting everyone in a room for a few hours, can be addressed during the monthly management meeting.
  24. Avoid checking up on whether someone did something the previous day. Looking forward is great management and looking backward is micromanagement.
  25. Line up all your meetings in a day instead of spreading them over in a week. Hence the energy and order falls into one place.
  26. Have your CFO give you a cash report everyday. Observing the source of cash flowing in and out on a daily basis gives real insight into your business’s financial model.
  27. Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity and cash flow is king.
  28. Success belongs to those who have these two attributes: An insatiable desire to learn. An unquenchable bias for action.
  29. Along the journey, there is a set of habits that will make the climb easier. “Routine sets you free.”
  30. And lastly, whatever you do, avoid doing all at once. One thing at a time!

Do you have anything to add? Go ahead and add in the comment section below!

Yashraj Kothari

Author at The Hacker Street
Passionate about Startups and the entire idea of having one amazes me a lot! An avid reader and have a strong pole for "Anything can be created by Writing".

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