I’ve audited dozens of startups
Here are the biggest growth mistakes they keep making
Hi there,
I’ve been conducting a lot more growth audits recently. I’m nosy as hell, so it's fantastic to dive deep into lots of organisations and analyse the data and approach from top to bottom.
Every audit is different, the data I request, the conversations I have, the roadmap I recommend, but over time, I have noticed a few patterns, challenges/issues that are more common.
So now you get to be nosy and learn the most common mistakes and my advice for solving them.
What is a growth audit?
It feels important to cover this first so you know what is driving these learnings. When I do a growth audit, I’m usually doing the following:
Review all the customer insights and data to understand the target audience.
Analysing the data across the various platforms to understand performance from acquisition through to retention
Conduct a light review of the setup and performance of key channels
Review the growth strategy and current approach (usually through interviewing various key team members)
The end result is an analysis of 20-30 different areas to pinpoint:
What the key growth levers are
Identify roadblocks to scaling up
Determine the strategic focuses for scalable growth
Help build a more reliable growth engine
So what are the most common issues that turn up?
Issue 1: Too many priorities
When everything is important, nothing is. A lack of focus is a killer of growth. I often combine strategic priorities with back-of-the-napkin type calculations to work out the potential impact of focusing on certain priorities.
In general, I recommend tackling areas step by step, focusing first on fundamentals: your monetisation approach and retention metrics.
Then, looking at optimising the customer journey. Often, this helps solve a lot of the issues that brands face around acquisition.
Issue 2: Testing too much in one go
I talked about this in a newsletter a few months ago.
Startups often move fast and want to test everything at once: new products, audiences, markets, and channels. B
ut when you test two new things at the same time (e.g. a new product and a new marketing channel), it becomes impossible to know what actually worked.
That’s the essence of the "No Two New's" rule: avoid testing two unknowns in one go. This makes it hard to audit and truly understand performance, so often my advice involves a better testing structure so they can isolate better what is and isn’t working.
Issue 3: Too vague and fuzzy language
“Feel better”, “Achieve more”, “Improve your health”… what do these phrases have in common? They say nothing. So many startups use broad language that doesn’t reflect what their customers say and think.
This is why the first course I created was on message-market fit. With how competitive it is these days, you have to be specific and really focus on your positioning.
My quick tip for humanising and specifying your language: Go through your reviews and pull phrases from there. Often, the best copy is stolen directly from your customers.
Recommendation
In every edition of Growth Waves, I also share a related resource to check out related to the week's topic.
You don’t need to hire someone to do a growth audit for you. If you have the skills on your team, take the time to conduct a growth audit yourself, really zooming out and reflecting on what is and isn’t working.
There is a great guide on LinkedIn that has various growth experts (including yours truly) share their tips for each step of conducting a growth audit.
If any of those issues sounded familiar, it might be worth taking some time to audit your own setup and investigate further.
It’s so easy to keep running, but taking a step back is so powerful to ensure you’re running in the right direction.
Daphne
It's so interesting that the very "move fast" mentality that we assume is a strength can actually be what holds a company back. Great article 👏👏.