What even is a growth approach?
And how can you build one?
Hi there,
What does it even mean to have a growth approach?
For me, it’s about:
Disciplined and ruthless focus on a few areas as a cross-functional team
Experimenting and learning what does/doesn’t work
Flexibility and agility in your approach when things aren’t working
Focusing on the customers and the data to drive decisions
It is such an important approach in order to bring focus to your DTC startup and also get more clarity on what is and isn’t working. With of course the end goal of scaling up your growth.
Many startups treat growth as marketing, but growth can come from other unexpected areas.
A non-marketing growth example
Take a vintage clothing store. If they are struggling with high return rates and low conversion rates they can do endless optimisations of ads, but they are unlikely to be profitable.
But instead, they could add a chat function and ask on the page if the customer needed support. By having very quick response times, they could help customers work out key challenges they were facing regarding sizing and quality.
Then as part of the growth team, they discussed the findings.
This reduced returns in the short term. In the long term, it fed into the product roadmap, highlighting which areas needed improvement.
Here, growth comes from customer support and product improvements.
So it’s key that you don’t just call your marketing team the growth team but build up your growth team step by step.
But how do you build a growth approach?
The foundation is working towards Product-Market Fit and clearly defining your North Star Metric
From there, you can strive to understand and improve retention as a foundation of your growth model
You then identify and prioritise the growth channels and loops key to your growth
This allows you to map out your growth and identify potential growth levers to focus on
To focus on these areas you work together in a growth team and follow a growth process
It isn’t something that changes overnight (organisational change never is) but taking the time to work on your process delivers 10x the gains that any quick win can.
Recommendation
I poured everything I know about building a growth approach and strategy into a course for CXL. A 900+ slide deck to create a 10 hour course that will help you develop a growth-focused approach for your organisation, understand what you need to get into place, how to work out your growth strategy and start running growth experiments.
You can check out the course here.
I also have a 10% off discount for my community, just use the code DAPHNE at checkout!
If you have any questions at all about it drop a message,
Daphne