How Funded Startups Are Scaling Remotely During COVID-19
San Francisco, May 10th, 2020 – After 10 years in growing early-stage startups, Andrew Lee Miller noticed a very common scenario happening over and over again. After successfully raising their first round of funding, startup founders would often focus all their resources on hiring a full-time Marketing Director to grow the company. Handling this post-round phase was stressful, as CEOs also had to worry about suddenly appeasing investors, developing the next round of their product, and managing a boom in team size. The companies that prioritized internal hiring would usually lose a crucial 2-3 months of growth in exchange for a large learning curve on hiring, strategy development and finding a culture fit for their team. In the fast-paced world of high growth startups, 3 months is a lifetime, and according to Forbes “over 70% of startups fail because of premature scaling”. Miller, who himself has driven 3 early-stage startup exits as Head of Marketing, was even once the all-too-quickly made fulltime Marketing hire at a YCombinator startup that had just raised $5,000,000.
He said “They hired me, and I quickly began hustling to build a strategy, and get processes in place for growth, but I immediately hit roadblocks on every single campaign I pushed forwards. The company just wasn’t truly ready to scale enough for me to be justified, and I quickly learned that they had listened to their investors and spent a ton of time and effort on hiring a Marketing Director, and hadn’t stopped to realize it wasn’t the right time. Four months later, I left the company having not been able to do very much as far as growth. It was the hardest time in my professional life. I was really sad and even worse, it cost the company hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars”.
After posting publicly about that traumatic experience, Miller noticed a deluge of consulting requests from other founders who knew his skills would buy them time on needing to hire internally themselves. Startups in Andrew’s network began to hire him as a remote interim CMO to build out their analytics, set up their first few campaigns, and do PR for their round closing. Miller realized that companies that used a remote consultant to scale for those first 6 months were much better able to navigate that stressful hypergrowth phase, and GrowthExpertz was born. Since that time 4 years ago, many early-stage startups have turned to Andrew and the GrowthExpertz team to strategize, conceptualize, launch and scale growth campaigns remotely for 3-12 months after they raise a round, so as not to risk making potentially bad fulltime hires themselves. Boutique Growth agencies like GrowthExpertz are perfect for hypergrowth startups because they allow the internal team to focus on product and service whilst knowing that highly specialized marketing efforts are happening in tandem. Making a full-time hire takes on average from 3 to 6 months. The upside of working with an agency like GrowthExpertz is that they are able to start immediately and you end up saving time and money while expert marketers strategize and execute your growth campaigns! Having over 50 years of collective experience in Digital Marketing marketing and Startup sales, the GrowthExpertz, which is now one of the leading marketing agencies for startups in San Francisco, has already helped over 30 startups scale in the past 5 years. The team has successfully scaled startups to over $22,000,000 in subsequent funding rounds, and has launched startups for BBVA Bank, Tinder’s parent company Match Group and other famous international startups such as Different in Australia and more.
Adam Robinson, was one such founder. Robinson, the founder of GetEmails knew that for his second startup he didn’t want to wait to grow. He said “With my first startup it took us 6 years go get it to scale, and I really knew nothing about launching a company…I just had a really cool product that worked. A friend recommended I chat with Andrew and I was so impressed with the recommendations he gave me on the phone. I hired him on the spot and within 30 days we already had a $25 Customer Acquisition Cost, he got us in Forbes magazine, and we were at $10,000 MRR in month 1…it was insane”.
Unlike traditional agency models, every year GrowthExpertz limits the companies they work with to only a select a few purpose-driven organizations and work collectively towards their success.
This means that they work with you as a team, not for you as a client. Think of them as a group of interim CMOs for innovative corporations and high-growth startups. They join, research, conceptualize, pitch, test and scale every marketing/sales channel exactly as an internal CMO would. Their goal is to handle all aspects of growth during your most stressful times. In COVID times, the need to mitigate risk and minimize fulltime heads you bring on to your team is higher than ever. Founder Andrew Lee Miller said “ We want you to go focus on research and development, managing your team and capital requirements, and we will handle launching and scaling your campaigns. We will figure out your most cost-effective high LTV channels and scale them through the roof, while you’re busy working on keeping customers and users happy”.