The risk of scaling too soon - Building Momentum

Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.

Imagine this: you’re a year or two post-launch and things are going well. You’ve got a steady stream of leads, marketing is building traction, you’re seeing high-quality sales conversations. It’s all you’ve wanted for so long.

So what do you do? You capitalize on it!

You decide to double down on your current strategy.

You hire more sales reps who are eager to take the simple, repeatable playbook you’ve developed and roll it out.

You expand your product team – surely you’ve found the winning formula, and it’s just a matter of building all the things you’ve heard customers ask for.

You bring on the whole marketing team and give them the budgets they’re asking for.

The brief is simple. Scale what’s working.

The teams build processes, build alignment, set up the sales and marketing platforms. The calendars are created, the annual planning, the big strategic goals set.

Sounds great.

Except…

A year later, you’re running out of cash, your team are burnt out, and nothing’s working as you expected, anywhere. Everything is just not running to plan.

You’re a victim of premature go-to-market optimization.

I’ve seen this happen a few times at various size companies.

The plan is decidedly to ‘scale’ – but the go-to-market strategy – the product, ICP, pricing, proposition – is still in flux.

Putting your foot on the gas before the GTM has settled means you’re unnecessarily (and unconsciously) prioritizing ‘repeatability’ over innovation and flexibility.

That becomes hard to unwind because you’ve got targets… which are otherwise known as ‘numbers picked out of thin air that you’ve now committed to, or face personal performance issues’.

Your teams have quotas and they want the easiest route to reach their on-target earnings. Do you think they’re going to jump at the chance to try something experimental and unproven: shifting to a new target customer, to a new product, or to new messaging? Probably not.

So instead, wait. Scale reactively based on demand, rather than scale the supply. Scale when your glass is overflowing – don’t buy a bucket in the hope you’ll catch the rain.

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