Blitzscaling: A Guide on how to Grow Your Startup Fast

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When scaling your startup, two words are important - focus and speed. That’s what blitzscaling is all about. The term was coined by founder and investor Reid Hoffman. Hoffman has a portfolio that will be the envy of any entrepreneur and in an interview with HBR, he revealed blitzscaling, a guide for entrepreneurs who want to scale up as fast as possible. Scaling up is not a new idea, but until now, there was no playbook for entrepreneurs to follow.

Here is how Hoffman puts it;

Why is blitzscaling important?

Startups have two major competitions, the first ones are bigger companies with more resources and the second ones are other startups. This is a precarious situation to be in because if a startup is moving too slowly, a bigger company could easily swoop in with a similar idea and take over the market. On the other hand, other startups with similar or even lesser resources but that are moving much faster could equally take over the market in no time. This means that the moment a startup comes up with a scalable idea, it needs to move as fast as possible if it wants to beat the competition.

Here is how to blitzscale in three steps

Step 1. You must know the three dimensions of scale

There are three dimensions of scaling. These are; growing revenue, growing customer base, and scaling the organization. Most entrepreneurs focus on the first two and neglect the last one. But Hoffman points out that scaling the organization is as important as the other two dimensions. This involves building up the organization’s capacity to handle rapid growth. One of the ways to do this is by using the latest technology.

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Step 2. You must ask yourself the hard questions and figure out the right answers

Carl Jung said that asking the right question is already half the solution to a problem. It is an indication that you are on the right track. However, many entrepreneurs do not know what questions to ask when scaling up and this can be a problem. Here are some of the questions you should have answers to if you want to blitzscale.

• Which parts of the company to scale first?

• How will you allocate talent?

• How will you maintain the company’s culture?

• How will you communicate?

Step 3. You must know when the time is right to blitzscale

When you want to blitzscale, it is also important to know what level your organization is at presently. This can be easily identified using the five levels of organizational scale-up outlined by Hoffman. These are; Family level, Tribe level, Village level, City level, and Nation level. The number of employees in the company is directly correlated to its scale level because it is a measure of the organization’s customer base. The more the customers, the higher the level. The best time to scale is when a startup has a minimum viable product (MVP), has identified a target market, and developed a product-market fit. Most companies achieve these within the family, tribe, or village scale level. It is different for different companies,

Challenges?

Of course, there are challenges you may face when blitzscaling. The two major ones are managerial inefficiency and capital intensity. The third challenge that may present itself to first movers is finding solutions to unique problems along the way. Read the full article below to learn more about blitzscaling.

Tips & Tricks

Since we are talking about growing your business, let’s throw in some tips on how to become better at cold emailing. Compared to other digital marketing strategies, cold email has been around for a very long time. Because of this, it could be easily overlooked. However, that will be a mistake. Despite its age, cold email remains one of the most effective marketing strategies, and the best part is that it is less expensive compared to many other options available today. Yet so many people either ignore it or are not proficient enough to get results with cold emailing. Either way, here are four tips that should boost your cold emailing game.

Make your email subject as long as possible - this gives the reader an idea of the content of your email at a glance and helps them decide if it is worth their time or not. If you did your research right, chances are that they will open the email to read more. A shorter email subject line lacks the appeal of curiosity and could easily be overlooked.

Follow-up emails are excellent reminders -  multiple outreach messages work better than a single message

It is a game of numbers - The more contacts you email, the better your chances

 Personalize your email - So how do you make your email stand out? By applying simple and basic personalization tricks, beginning with the subject of the email. Avoid sending bulk emails because you can hardly personalize those.

Read the full article below;

That’s all for now folks.

Until next time, stay inspired and keep chasing your dreams!

Cheers,

Alex