Down to earth advice to avoid crashing your scale-up. This presentation was given by Toon Vanagt on the Tech Startup Day in Brussels on 18/02/2016. Cautionary tale to not scale-up before your startup has reached true product/market fit.

1. Scaling up: the sky is the limit?
Down to earth advice to avoid crashing your scale-up
Toon Vanagt - @Toon
Co-founder casius.com, data.be,leanfund.com lex.be

2. The degree to which a product satisfies a
strong market demand…
Validate product/market fit

3. 1999: Casius.com founders
Raised and “burned” > 4M€ in next 3 years

4. • Timing is everything (first
dot.com bubble)
• Tiny % of a huge market seems
solid ground for business plan,
but is very hard to reach
• Cash is more important than
your mother!
• Cultural & legal aspects matter
& differ accross Europe too
Lessons

5. • Burned 4.000.000 EUR of VC money to build
a 1.850.000 EUR turnover business…
• Chicken-Egg dilemma when you need to
build 2 sided markets.
• Off-line marketing is a very expensive way
to convert on-line leads
• Human ressources are a crucial bottle neck,
but also your core asset
• Unfocussed: lots of money in the bank makes
it very hard to kill your darlings, cut fancy
features and skip your fancy wishlist
More expensive lessons

6. Premature scaling?
Stresses startup’s
ability to execute

7. That scale up button I will not hit
Before I reach product market fit

8. • Eyeballs
• Visitors
• Retweets
• Likes
• Exposure
• Downloads
Don’t get blinded by vanity metrics

9. Focus on revenues

10. Retention & repeat usage metrics matter
• Active users
• Engagement
• Customers
• MRR
• CAC
• Churn
• Marketing & process
automation

11. It takes hard work & lots of capital to ‘squeeze’ those
leads UP in order to attract, win & keep customers!
Gravity does not apply
to your sales funnel!

12. • Continuous
Incremental product/market fit

13. Business data
Annual account summary
Graphics say more
than a thousand numbers

14. Business data
Notify on changes & find similar prospects based on company age, location, size and industry
Notify on changes in
customer data

15. Full-Text search
Across 2 501 818 company publications
Filtered search
Entity recognition
30% “StartMeUp” discount*

16. The sky is not the limit.
Your imagination is.
@Toon