This is a guest post by Chris Winterhoff, who is an expert in Growth. Currently Chris is a fractional Growth leader and growth advisor at Perceptycs.
Previously he headed Growth at Onto, a UK platform for all-inclusive electric car subscriptions. And was also Head of Marketing at Mashroom, which covers the UK housing industry.
Guest Author: Chris Winterhoff
What’s a startup’s most precious resource? Capital? Talent? Flexibility? Time?
If we asked a room full of startup people what their most precious resource is, what do you think they would answer?
My answer is TIME.
Because, as a startup’s PMF or GTM is not fully formed,
Time passing = lost revenue/more cash burn
Time passing = time for competitors to catch up
Time passing = lost team motivation if there are no results
Almost by definition, startups are looking to change things, to disrupt the status quo and to take market share as quickly as possible.
Startups are in a race against time versus slow-moving market giants and other startups.
Whether a startup is gearing for 𝑷𝒓𝒐𝒅𝒖𝒄𝒕 𝑴𝒂𝒓𝒌𝒆𝒕 𝑭𝒊𝒕 (PMF) or a better 𝑮𝒐 𝑻𝒐 𝑴𝒂𝒓𝒌𝒆𝒕 (GTM), time is vital in each of these situations.
Over the last year, I’ve worked with 4 startups to de-risk their GTM or find their PMF. And in each one of these cases we reduced their time spent testing. Instead we invested in research by interviewing customers, non-customers and mapping competitor and market perception of their ideal customers whilst exploring their key sticking points for product adoption.
Although success is never guaranteed, we managed to decrease their 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐬 and saved them precious time, money while getting their internal team fired up for their next milestone.
If your testing is yielding fewer positive results than you’ve anticipated and you want to change that, shoot me a DM and we’ll hop on a strategy call to see how you can get back on track.
