Scaling up: the sky is the limit? Down to earth advice to avoid crashing your scale-up

Toon Vanagt - @Toon Co-founder casius.com, data.be,leanfund.com lex.be

The degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand…

Validate product/market fit

1999: Casius.com founders

Raised and “burned” > 4M€ in next 3 years

•  Timing is everything (first dot.com bubble)

•  Tiny % of a huge market seems solid ground for business plan, but is very hard to reach

•  Cash is more important than your mother!

•  Cultural & legal aspects matter & differ accross Europe too

Lessons

•  Burned 4.000.000 EUR of VC money to build a 1.850.000 EUR turnover business…

•  Chicken-Egg dilemma when you need to build 2 sided markets.

•  Off-line marketing is a very expensive way to convert on-line leads

•  Human ressources are a crucial bottle neck, but also your core asset

•  Unfocussed: lots of money in the bank makes it very hard to kill your darlings, cut fancy features and skip your fancy wishlist

More expensive lessons

Premature scaling?

Stresses startup’s ability to execute

That scale up button I will not hit Before I reach product market fit

•  Eyeballs •  Visitors •  Retweets •  Likes •  Exposure •  Downloads

Don’t get blinded by vanity metrics

Focus on revenues

Retention & repeat usage metrics matter •  Active users •  Engagement •  Customers •  MRR •  CAC •  Churn •  Marketing & process

automation

It takes hard work & lots of capital to ‘squeeze’ those leads UP in order to attract, win & keep customers!

Gravity does not apply to your sales funnel!

•  Continuous

Incremental product/market fit

Business data Annual account summary

Graphics say more than a thousand numbers

Business data Notify on changes & find similar prospects based on company age, location, size and industry

Notify on changes in customer data

Full-Text search Across  2 501 818 company publications

Filtered search Entity recognition

30% “StartMeUp” discount*

The sky is not the limit. Your imagination is.

@Toon