Scaling Up: Key Challenges for Start-ups to Consider

Any given year, there are a number of tech start-ups that fail. For the past couple of years that risk of failure has pushed tech start-ups to become established within their first years. That rings even more true in 2020, as we see funding and VC investment on a downturn due to the pandemic. How to address the pressure of becoming established is what we can understand as the process from a start-up to a scale-up, to reach the pinnacle of a sustainable business. Today, we’ll take a deeper dive into what this transition means and how investments with the right amount of return are key. 

What is a start-up?

A start-up is mostly understood from the angle of a brilliantly materialized business idea, this idea turns into a new company with exponential growth and limitless geographic restrictions. Due to their innovation, start-up experiences success from growing customers and revenue. However, they start to see linear exponential growth across all areas of their business, so as the company grows so does the cost to keep it running and the funding necessary for that to happen. The risk of not becoming a sustainable business is always there because you are still trying to figure out the right business model, management, marketing, and technology for your product or service. 

What is a scale-up? 

A scale-up would be a start-up that has already achieved placing their product or service on the market and they are experiencing this accelerated growth. However, the most important characteristic of this phase is that companies have found a repeatable scalable business model. Your customers and revenue are growing, but your costs don’t increase in the same proportion. 

The biggest challenge ahead

Understanding the difference between both is important to address the biggest challenges you may come across to accomplish the mission of sustainability. 

To a start-up, creating a unique customer experience is perhaps the biggest challenge they will face. In order to place a SaaS or eCommerce site in today’s competitive market, your value offer has to be both innovative and unique. With all the other risk factors of time, resources, and cash flow you may face it is crucial that your technology or site be set up correctly from the start. 

To a scale-up, figuring out how to automate this repeatable business process is perhaps the biggest challenge they will face. In order to transition from an “everyone-does-any-and-everything” mentality of a start-up, you will need to optimize your resources, leadership, and find ways to automate your operations. 

However, the biggest challenge ahead for either, is the unprecedented times business are growing and scaling in. During these past few months, companies have been more reliant on their online presence. With the sudden overflow in digital reliance, many businesses are in need of taking time to evaluate their platforms, to improve their customer’s experience and to maximize their conversions. 

Getting it right THIS time is crucial. 

Whether a SaaS or an eCommerce business, you will need to be strategic with your brand. Without a planned effort to gain traction, sales, and revenue for your business you are unlikely to achieve sustainability quickly and efficiently. Fulfillment, quality control, and project completion will always be an uphill battle when you don’t set your brand up correctly online and have specific goals for your marketing. Moreover, it will become increasingly difficult to achieve sustainability if you don’t have the right people, products, and infrastructure in place.

If you find yourself in a start-up, scale-up, or transition stage we want you to know we are all in this together. On a mission to become clients’ trusted development partners, we help you with innovative ideas to build back-end development that is tailored to their business needs. We can help you rethink your company’s customer experience and allow you to fully focus on generating more revenue by using our expertise to assess potential risks and minimize them. We are committed to helping you navigate these and any other challenges and we hope working with us will simplify the solutions. 

Interested in exploring this further? Schedule a call with us today!