List of 7 Startup Growth Models

Startup Growth is one of the biggest challenge startups face during their journey. Lets discuss growth strategies in this article.

Hey, welcome to today’s read.

Today we will going to discuss-

1. Sales-Led Growth
2. Marketing-Led Growth
3. Product-Led Growth
4. Community-Led Growth
5. Founder-Led Growth
6. Customer-Led Growth
7. Content-Led Growth

1. Sales-Led Growth

Sales team acquires/converts customers with outbound efforts

Ex: Palantir Technologies, Salesforce, etc.

Pros

1. Complex products that require custom integrations
2. Higher ACV (Annual Contract Value), lower-churn enterprise customers

Cons

1. Longer sales-cycles, higher barrier to entry
2. Requires talented (expensive!) sales teams

2. Marketing-Led Growth

Acquisition driven by ads, gated content, blogs, ebooks, videos, newsletters, SEO

Ex: HubSpot, Buffer

Pros

1. Can quickly fill ToFu (Top-of-Funnel)
2. Cheaper than sales-led

Cons

1. Over-emphasis on acquisition at-all-costs can result in higher downstream churn
2. Social channels are becoming more expensive

3. Product-Led Growth

Customer activation requires NO human touch-points (free-trial or freemium)

Ex: Slack, Asana

Pros

1. Better user experience drives “bottoms-up” organic growth
2. Requires no sales team to get started

Cons

1. Hard to move users from free to paid
2. Requires exponentially more users due to lower ACV

4. Community-Led Growth

Distribution, adoption, customer support driven by groups of passionate customers

Ex: Figma, Notion

Pros

1. Great for “horizontal” products with divergent use-cases
2. Member-mentality = higher customer retention

Cons

1. Fostering sustainable, organic communities is extremely difficult
2. Hard to apply with certain types of products

5. Founder-Led Growth

Founder’s personality, vision, & social presence drives acquisition

Ex: Tesla, MrBeast

Pros

1. Thought leadership creates high degree of trust
2. Long-term audience-building solves for early distribution challenges

Cons

1. Risky—the company’s success is inextricably tied to a single person
2. Requires significant time investment from the founder

6. Customer-Led Growth

Strategy driven by customer insights & measured w/ customer-centric KPIs (rather than business-centric)

Ex: The Walt Disney Company, Nordstrom

Pros

1. High customer retention & satisfaction
2. Growing community of CLG practitioner’s like Forget The Funnel, Bob Moesta

Cons

1. In-depth qualitative & quantitive customer research can take a long time & cost $$
2. What’s best for the customer isn’t always best for the business

7. Content-Led Growth

Similar to marketing-led but deeper focus on no-click content (valuable content with no CTAs)

Ex: Intercom, Slidebean

Pros

1. Like founder-led, greatly increases trust
2. Freely-given value creates deep loyalty (before prospects are even customers!)

Cons

1. Consistently creating valuable content requires tons of dedicated time & energy
2. Hard-to-track attribution can deter companies from sticking with it

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