A conversation about growth must begin with market type. This is the most ignored aspect of growth strategy discussions within startups yet it's fundamental. My favorite is the discussion regarding entering an existing market, which is the most common type. Here's how it works...

When entering an existing market you must think through two key questions:

(1) Who is the precise customer I am attempting to serve? (2) What can I offer them that is 10x better relative to the alternatives?

When it comes to the question of the target customer, the most common mistake is the target customer definition is too broad. It must be almost comically narrow to the point where you may be misunderstood for such a narrow focus. A few examples to illustrate...

At Wealthfront our initial target customer was an engineer at a pre-IPO tech company, typically between 25 - 35 years old, less than $1M net worth, and had a personal preference to delegate money management to a trusted 3rd party...

Tesla sold roadsters to a very narrow band of ~2,500 people wealthy enough, risk-taking enough, and technology-forward enough, and who didn't care about interior specs or storage capacity to take the leap of faith to buy what could have turned into a $130k lawn ornament...

To the second question, you must then have a precise hypothesis around what you can offer the target customer that is 10x better relative to the alternatives. That doesn't mean 10x the features. Typically, it's 10x the value on a very limited set of features. More examples...

Wealthfront's early features: (1) 10x lower cost relative to the traditional industry (2) built an investment portfolio (3) rebalanced the portfolio automatically (4) save you on taxes automatically. That was enough to carve out a few hundred early adopters who became obsessed...

The roadster was (1) faster (2) cleaner (3) safer than the alternatives (Porche) but, again, didn't have the bells and whistles of their competitors such as a fancy interior. But that didn't matter. It was 10x better on the dimensions the ~2,500 target customers cared about...

The reason this is important is you can constrain the messaging and positioning of your product, as well as the product feature set to build something great with a relatively low budget that carves those customers away from the existing market. And that becomes your beachhead...

But b/c most startups don't consider the market type question, they tend to message themselves too broadly and have too broad of a feature set. And that's no way to carve out a wedge into an existing market. Growth is doomed from the start as a result.