Mitigate risk by exploring assumptions on market trends and critical success factors. Startups fail when they don't seek to learn what they don't already know. 

Target audience profiling (including one-to-one interviews) to understand their 'jobs to be done' with regards to your product.

Plot the steps each type of customer takes via acquisition, activation, and retention. Find gaps to experiment with new user flows. 

Determine 'problem solution fit' via real-world interviews with potential product users and then test hypothesis with prototypes. The R in R&D.

Start with a variety of value propositions (refined via customer interviews) to hone a proven sales message fit for market. 

Not just logo design and color palettes! True branding comes from the position the brand holds in the mind of the market. 

Google bought Applied Semantics in 2013 and changed the game forever. Today, 'search' includes YouTube, TikTok, and more. Prioritize content relevance for your target audience.  

Transaction fees, freemium, free trial or front-end one-time or subscription pricing. Understanding the users WTP (willingness to pay) is the heart of product-led growth motions.

Strengthen customer relationship with a personal level of access, keeping customers informed about updates, showcasing success stories, and other forms of content and campaign that pushes customer hot buttons.

Enable customers to share positive experience about your brand at the moment they have a positive experience, incentivized with reward points, discounts, free product capacity, or otherwise. 

Create premium experiences that a portion of your community will opt for, beyond your core product offering. This additional layer of service helps galvanize a true fan brand army. 

Product-led sales divided across 5 sales motions: conversion, retention, expansion (selling more of the same such as seats or  volume), upsell (selling something extra) and consolidation (often done as extended user agreements for economies of scale). 

There is no 'big splash' launch day for market traction. Focus on a series of events that build early adopters and true fans for market validation before confidently rolling out campaigns more broadly.

From paid ad attribution through to acquisition conversion rates and product analytics for user flow analysis to optimize retention and engagement.

The bread and butter of marketing. Match the product experience to actual needs with compelling inspiration for immediate action. 

Phased launches that add value to the audience and actionable intelligence to the team for alignment and re-prioritization of projects and tasks. 

Plot workflows and check-lists via diagrams that both capture and communicate the agreed essence of every value-driver for performance. 

Multi-variate split tests will develop your gut instincts, but also teach the humility of always verifying ideas via test campaigns before committing significant budget for scale. Testing leads to statistically valid improvements at each point of the user journey with compounding effects.

From brand messaging to long-form content that progresses the sale. Landing pages. Email series. Thought leadership. Benchmark reports. Case studies. Ad campaigns. Everything connects.

An agile culture brings out the best in everyone to support a responsive and natural cadence of prioritization, including feature development, CI/CD workflow, and continuous market announcements. 

Beyond legal requirements, risk is about the balance of making too many assumptions and making an educated best guess. 

Beyond the original product launch, create a product portfolio that serve adjacent markets. Create a feedback loop with customers for insight in all phases of product development, and watch out for disruptive innovation. Don't become a Blockbuster Video. 

The best teams do not work in silos', nor feel sensitive about ideas coming from outside each persons 'role', nor operate by dictatorship. Encourage a servant-leader culture of 'independent contributors', curating collective intelligence for group consensus. 

Recruiting new performant staff becomes the bottleneck of growth for startups in the scale-up phase. Hire a diverse set of skills, backgrounds, perspectives and experiences. If two managers always think alike, one of them is not needed. Innovation depends on variety. 

Partner integrations is the gateway to huge Network Effects required for true scale. 

Be vigilant of market differences and flexible in approach. What works in Japan does not work in Brazil. Each new market category has a unique array of substitute products, trends, psychographics, and so on, to account for. 

Unless you bootstrap to the moon, you may want to raise funds throughout the journey. Investment pitch development is an art unto itself.