When do you begin the Growth phase in your company? When you can retain customers and that demonstrates that you have a product-market-fit. If you ramp up growth when you cannot retain customers, you will burn money, and achieve nothing.
More so, retaining customers means that your next cohort of customers MUST have better experiences than the previous, demonstrating that you are closing the gap between the frictions in the markets and the solutions you have for them.
That gap must keep getting smaller as your product continues to mature. In further mathematics in secondary school, they call it an asymptote (closing the gap as the limit tends to infinity).
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Do not scale a product that does not have a market fit yet. You will waste your resources. Have patience, get a market fit and then ramp-up.
I used to be super-academic here with bluntness and perspectives anchored on data, telling companies how I see it. But I have stopped those posts as they made many lose confidence in themselves. I recalled asking a company which raised more than $100m to sell itself. That ecommerce firm was using money to attain growth when the product had not attained any fit in the market.
In Tekedia Mini-MBA, many asked us to give them options to prepay for 5 years; Emmanuel S Akintunde first asked, and now we have dozens. Immediately, we knew that we had obtained the optimal state that members could pay for an online school 5 years ahead. With that validation, we began the growth phase.
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