Addressing your startup’s growth rate early on will immensely help its future success. Here are some tips for how to do so.

Startups need to grow – it is a simple goal. But knowing what to do to grow your startup is not so simple. Knowing your business and building a product or service to achieve product to market fit is a difficult but not impossible task when you get your startup out of the gate. Once you have a product to market fit, the team needs to focus on nothing else but to grow the metric that matters.

If you want to learn how to grow your startup, here are the resources you should read and watch, in order:

• Startup = Growth by Paul Graham – this is a must read
• Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death? by Joel Spolsky – this is the case for why you need growth
• A Recipe for Growth – Adding Layers to the Cake by Jeff Jordan – strategies for how to grow
• The Secret Behind Pinterest’s Growth Was Marketing, Not Engineering by Liz Gannes – approaches that are not technical but essential for growth
• Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s Early Days by Mike Isaac
• How we put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users – Chamath Palihapitiya;(user-provided transcript) – what should you focus on when prioritizing growth
• Chasing Facebook’s Next Billion Users by Douglas MacMillan
• Ready to Grow Breakout Session at f8

I would also recommend watching Lecture 6 of How to Start a Startup by Sam Altman:

Startups don’t have to be experts at building a great product or in “growth hacking.” They just need to be experts in their customers and their customers’ problems. I cannot emphasize enough how critical this part of building a startup is.

Understanding your customer is one of the fundamental ways to build a great product and once that understanding and product are there, then running 1) experiments to find the North Star, 2) leading the customer to the “ah-ha” moment, and 3) making sure they are actually using your service to solve their problem become the three major goals of the team. All of this is easier said than done. Ruthlessly building and executing a growth strategy is what got Facebook to where they are today.

Growing at 5% to 7% a week is not a trivial task. In Paul Graham’s post, you will see the following table:

The kind of business that you will build is dramatically different if you start at different growth rates. The difficult question to ask yourself is what kind of a business are you building?

He believes focusing on growth early on is key:

Focusing on hitting a growth rate reduces the otherwise bewilderingly multifarious problem of starting a startup to a single problem. You can use that target growth rate to make all your decisions for you; anything that gets you the growth you need is ipso facto right. Should you spend two days at a conference? Should you hire another programmer? Should you focus more on marketing? Should you spend time courting some big customer? Should you add x feature? Whatever gets you your target growth rate.