Many founders try to sprint through the growth valley of death by focusing solely on top line growth. But until you reach a strategic inflection point where you need to prioritize speed over efficiency, you may better FastScale. You first create a solid high growth foundation and then scale your business fast, predictably and efficiently. If you FastScale, it may take you a bit longer to create a massively valuable business. But the probability that you succeed is significantly higher.

With a company-wide focus on customer success you can achieve your growth and exit valuation goals. If you make your customers incredibly successful, they will churn less, buy more and spread the word. Referrals will further reduce customer acquisition costs and CAC payback period. You recoup your investments quicker and can reinvest the money in order to further fuel your growth engine. A virtuous cycle!

Checklist for founders on actions they may consider when navigating the coronavirus crisis.

Startups were hit by a black swan – COVID-19. Suddenly, founders have been forced to think about how to navigate a times of extreme crisis and may have already had to switch to survival mode. As a venture capital investor, I am currently in constant touch with our portfolio companies and founders. In this article, I want to share my thoughts on how founders can weather this storm and give them at least some straightforward guidance.

How to boost growth? How to acquire more customers? How to get more traction? If you are a founder looking for answers to these questions, do not directly jump to analysing options to further fill the top of the conversion funnel. Optimise your conversion funnel first. Optimising the conversion funnel will not only lead to more customers, but also to lower customer acquisition costs, shorter payback periods, better CLV/CAC-ratios and ultimately higher growth.

Achieving high growth and predictable revenues is challenging, and founders will encounter many obstacles on their way. A high-functioning board of directors can help founders overcome these obstacles like a low-functioning Board can worsen the situation. In this article, I provide some guidelines as to how to develop a high-functioning Board.

As Marc Andreesen once put it: "The only thing that matters is product/market fit". Fuelling the growth engine and entering the high growth phase does not make sense if a company has not yet found product/market fit. But as product/market fit is not binary the question arises how to measure product/market fit? Founders may gather and analyse quantitative and qualitative information and need to use their intuition in order to assess whether they can start scaling heavily.

Founders want to win big markets, disrupt industries, create new digital business models, build competitive moats and change the way business is done. In today’s highly competitive markets, founders are very often required to lead their teams to hight growth and to generate predictable revenues. But entering a high growth phase comes with a lot of challenges and generating predictable revenues is often easier said than done. In this article, I elaborate on how to structure the organisation.

Referring to the article on how to calculate unit economics for platform businesses, we have been asked whether we could provide an infographic reflecting our calculations. Here you go.

While there seems to be a common understanding on how to calculate most KPIs, I see some inconsistent approaches as to calculating unit economics for platform businesses. This heterogeneity leads to confusion and unnecessary time spent discussing what the correct approach is. With this article, my co-author Richard Meyer-Forsting and I want to share some of our insights we gathered over the years and explain how we believe unit economics for a platform business need to be calculated.