High Growth Handbook

Books · Source

Overview

This is more a book for companies that have raised a seed round or Series A round. Since I haven’t done that yet, I don’t know how much of it is actually useful vs just sounds useful. But definitely helped me think deeper about fundraising and org building

Key takeaways:

• at the seed stage, you’re focused on finding product-market fit with early adopters. But they make up just 5% of the market. You have to think beyond product and figure out how to take the market when you have initial PMF
• defensibility comes from a mixture of product innovation and distribution building. Purely product led defensibility is rare
• people emphasise network effects and data effects way too much. Very rare to see actual data moats, and network effects are a double edged sword. They unwind just as fast
• being able to raise prices and not lose customers means that you actually have a moat, and can start do focus on funding more distribution and R&D
• the role of the CEO is to decide what the company should do, and make sure it does that. CEO has to relentlessly say, “this is what we’re doing, this is why, and this is how we will do it”
• since the product causes initial success, founders of breakout companies think product development is their primary competency and asset. But in reality, the distribution channel and customer base derived from the first product is the biggest “go-forward” advantage and differentiator
• build a product so good that customers will use it over an incumbent => build a large user base on the back of this first product => grow relentlessly => build new products and monetise them with your product costing customer base and sales channels