You can feel it – you've got product-market fit.
You’ve got a group of maybe a few hundred to a thousand users who love your product and they’re coming back and asking for more.
You know there’s a sizeable, clearly defined group that are just like them, so now it's time to test a series of scalable strategies to find a playbook for repeatable growth.
You should continue to resist the temptation to storm ahead with lots of different ideas, but instead work to discover and lean in to the one or two strategies that work really well for your startup.
By now, you’ll probably have decent intuition about the growth channels that are likely to be successful, which means you can work to validate more focused hypotheses in these areas.
At this stage, you're looking for a hands-on Growth Leader.
You'll want to find someone who knows what they want to do over the next six months and who they need to hire to do it. They should have experience creating a growth channel out of nothing.
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Someone entrepreneurial will win out here – they should have a strong foundation for understanding growth, with expertise and proven success in the growth areas you are most bullish about.
Agencies tend to not be a great fit at this stage – you need someone who can not only develop a strategy, but also be strong at execution (at speed).
This role isn't easy to hire for and it could take some time to find someone with the right mix of skills and focus needed to start building a system for repeatable growth.
Given how important speed of execution is here, Founders like to bring us in to use our expertise and much-needed focus to help build the playbook.
We'll then support in hiring the specialisms to execute on said proven playbook, as well as a Head of Growth to take it on the next leg of the race.