Founders, pay attention to the war!
Welcome to the 30th edition of the GrowthX Newsletter. Every Tuesday & Thursday I write a piece on startups & business growth. Today’s piece is going to 94,400+ operators & leaders from startups like Google, Stripe, Swiggy, Razorpay, CRED & more
This morning, Vladimir Putin announced war on Ukraine.
Our prayers with the Ukrainians who aren't at fault.You must be wondering why you should care?
Here's why you need to pay attention 👇🏻
💰 Money hates uncertainty
Instances like this will disincentivize risky capital investments. That means there will be lesser capital to raise anytime soon.
🗓 Reassess your budget planning
Are you spending a lot on user acquisition/discounts? Do you have enough runway to keep growing the core business without raising external capital? What are cost centres for your business, what can you delay for now from a liquidity POV? Are you hiring expensive leaders - maybe not the best idea right now if you are early stage.
🎯 Focus on retaining the existing users
You should do this even in normal conditions. Focus on retention & really put hard goals to make sure you do not lose repeat business.
💵 Watch out for pricing strategy.
Potential customers might be too sensitive to pricing changes if things go south on this war. Watch out for any new pricing models you want to GTM. Maybe not the best time to increase prices.
🕹 Play the 80:20 game on growth.
Ask some hard question to yourself & your team. What are the core things that help you grow the business? List them down. Now pick the top 20% that matter and just focus on them in this period.
🤑 Refrain from expensive experiments, scale what works.
Don't try to scale experiments with no small scale proof of concept. Keep doing the new experiments but don't spend active money on it. Focus on what has worked for you & do that more.
🤞🏻 Closely watch out your consumer behaviour.
Observe your own user behaviour data for first time & repeat purchase. Keep speaking to founders / VCs in your space. If this war situation starts showing it's actual implications on global economy, it will impact behaviour for every type of user - even the most profitable/ LTV users.
To sum it up, don't screw up your bottom line in the face of growth. Get your team to align with why you are doing all these changes.
P.S. Some folks might think this is too aggressive for something that happened thousands of kilometers away. Trust me, economic downturn travels faster than COVID. Plus, I will be the happiest person if none of the potential economic repercussions happen.