244 - The Context - Growth

The backstory and foundation

Startups are businesses that are designed to grow very fast. At a certain point that must mean very fast growth in revenue, otherwise the business will not be viable. In Q4 of 2023, our unifying theme at Mayday was “show we can grow”. We grew our monthly recurring revenues 2.7x in the quarter, an 8.5% compound weekly growth rate. I’m writing about my key learnings from that experience.

First, the context. We started working on Mayday in September 2021. We had a product live in April 2022. We got our first paying customer in September 2022, one year before our “show we can grow” quarter. We grew in the intervening year. We eagerly seized opportunities to acquire new customers. But as a means to an end of achieving product-market fit, rather than in first order service of revenue growth.

Looking back, I believe we hit that critical mass of product-market fit in Q3 of 2023. Balancer, the third of our trilogy of products for multi-entity businesses had gone live in May. Following a couple of months of post-launch refinements, we had the functionality in our suite to solve enough of a high enough percentage of potential customers’ needs. We probably could have implemented “show we can grow” as an internal focus in Q3, but not any earlier.

That’s a big learning for me. Context can also be interpreted as capacity. You need to have the capacity for growth, namely a base level of product-market fit. Without that, any focus on growth is going to be premature. It will inevitably lead to overselling and alienating people who, armed with product-market fit, could have become great customers.