Neal Kemp came to share his experience building products for fast-growing companies. He’ll be drawing from his experience as former cofounder of YC-backed startup Women.com, CTO of YC-backed GovPredict, and as growth consultant for successful Silicon Valley companies. 

1. Growing Your Startup,
The Easy Way!
By Neal Kemp

2. Consultant, Startup Advisor
Co-Founder, CTO Women.com (YC S14)
Y Combinator Alum
CTO GovPredict (YC S14)
About Me

3. What I will talk about today
1. The Easy Parts
2. The Hard Parts
3. How to Grow

4. The Easy Parts ...

5. Two Things in a Startup
Death Growth

6. Your Two Goals
1. Prevent Death
2. Promote Growth

7. Why is growth good?
● You make money
● You can more easily raise investment
● You don’t die
● You achieve your dreams!
Why is death bad?
● You stop making money
● Your dream is over, sad! :(

8. Questions to ask every day...
1. Will it help us grow?
2. Will not doing it kill us?
3. Is there anything else that can grow us
faster or more likely avoid death?

9. Things That Can Kill You
● Legal problems
● Cofounder Disputes
● Big company moving in on your market
● New government regulation
● Forgetting to pay taxes
● etc...

10. Method Channels Examples
Paid Acquisition Adwords, FB Ads
Viral Growth Conversation, social
media sharing, media
exposure
Airbnb, Facebook,
YouTube, Uber
SEO Google, Bing Quora, Stack Overflow,
TripAdvisor
Sales (traditional) Email, Phone, In Person Hubspot, Salesforce,
Workday
Things That Can Grow You

11. The Hard Parts ...

12. “Building something people want”
Actually not dying
Actually growing

13. How to Grow ...

14. Steps to Growth
1. Understand what growth is
2. Set goals
3. Execute a plan
4. Assess

15. 1. Understand

16. Top Terms to Know
● Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
● Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
● Lifetime Value (LTV)
● Week over Week Growth
● Churn Rate (%)
● Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
● Weekly Active Users (WAU)
● Monthly Active Users (MAU)

17. How fast should we grow?
● Early and focused (e.g. during Y Combinator)
○ Weekly: 5-7%
○ Monthly: 20-30%
● Small/Medium (e.g. post seed, pre-A)
○ Weekly: 3.5-5%
○ Monthly: 15-20%
● Medium/Large (post-A)
○ Hard to give numbers, much more dependent on industry details

19. Know Your Funnel
● How do they find out about you?
● How do you move them from knowing about you to interested?
● How do you sell the product to an interested lead?

20. 2. Set Goals

21. Set Goals!
What is your most important metric?
What is your goal for the metric this week, this month?

22. Pick your top metric
and don’t get
distracted by fake
metrics

23. 3. Execute a Plan

24. Viral Growth Quickstart Guide
Sorry, not today!

25. Startup Sales Quickstart Guide
Should your startup do traditional sales?
● Does each sale bring in more than ~$1000 in Lifetime Value (LTV)
How to do sales
● Figure out your process
● Set monthly goals
● Relentlessly solve bottlenecks if you don’t hit monthly goals
● Use Salesforce
● Use other tools!

26. Sales: Essential Tools
Tool Use Case
Salesforce, with Salesforce Inbox Manage Sales Process
Mailjoy Send Postal Campaigns
PersistIQ Send Email Campaigns
Talkdesk or Toky.co Make phone calls
Google Analytics Tracking
Mixpanel or KISSMetrics Tracking

27. Startup SEO Quickstart Guide
Should you use SEO?
● You have interesting, unique content that your customers are searching for
● You are ready for a long-term play
● You want to write content that people actually want to read!
How do to SEO
● Come up with list of target keywords
● Write content
● Get link backs
● Analyze results in Google Analytics and Moz

28. SEO: Essential Tools
Tool Use
Wordpress or other CMS Manage + Publish Content
Moz SEO Advice, Tracking
Google Analytics Tracking
Mixpanel or KISSMetrics Tracking

29. Startup Paid Acquisition Quickstart Guide
Should you use paid acquisition?
● Some approaches not recommended as long term growth plan
● Great for hacking initial growth
● Can be very competitive, very expensive
How to do paid acquisition
● Choose your platform(s)
● Buy ads
● Run A/B tests on every step of the funnel (ad copy, landing pages, etc)
● Compare cost of acquisition vs cost of campaign

30. Paid Acquisition: Essential Tools
Tool Use
Facebook Adwords, Instagram Ads,
LinkedIn Ads, etc.
Pay for users
Supermetrics Ad Performance Metrics
Google Analytics Tracking
Mixpanel or KISSMetrics Tracking

31. 4. Assess

32. Assess
● Did we hit our monthly sales goals?
● Did our key metric grow by our goal?
● What can we do next week/month to increase the growth number?

33. How to scale growth:
http://andrewchen.co/theres-only-a-few-ways-to-scale-user-growth-and-heres-the-l
ist/
Things that will kill you: http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
Wiki of important terms: http://saasmetrics.co/monthly-recurring-revenue
Growth calculator: http://growth.tlb.org/
Resources

34. Thanks!
neal@directional.io