How to Scale Your Startup

There comes a point in almost every startup’s career where they begin to plateau. Where they reach a no-man’s land and aren’t exactly sure if they’re headed for fame or disaster. It’s kind of like driving through the Mojave Desert on your way into Las Vegas. When everything looks the same and it hardly feels like your even moving. When one wrong turn could lead you to the middle of nowhere instead of the City of Lights.

While the more successful startups tend to coast past these moments of uncertainty, as if they didn’t even exist, several others find themselves at these standstills wondering how it is they got there and what they can do to move past it. But unfortunately, for some of these blossoming companies, it’s not necessarily what they can do, but what they didn’t do when they were branding themselves that landed them in this predicament. Something that although not fatal, is something you’re going to have to dig yourself out of.

Building a Brand for Longevity

When you’re beginning to develop the brand of your company there is a lot you need to take into consideration. The requests of investors, practicality, budget limitations, and much more. It can be overwhelming. But what should always be close to or at the top of that list, is longevity. Building a brand that can stand the test of time.

But what does that mean? How do we build a brand that can stand the test of time when we don’t even know what time will bring? Well, we do what all great branding strategists do – we make an educated guess.

While that might not be what you want to hear as a potential client of Rock Candy Media, it’s the reality of our uncertain times. In fact, we confidently support educated guesses in our everyday lives. Meteorologists don’t actually know when that Mars-sized meteor is going to crash into Beijing. They do some research and take what they do know to make an educated guess. I didn’t know if they were serving ‘beef’ tacos in the cafeteria last week. I saw a firm, brown substance and what looked like to be animal meat inside a tortilla and for my own sake, assumed it was beef – an educated guess.

At our growth hacking consultancy, our educated guesses are built around years of experience, a keen eye for the digital world around us, and an unquenchable thirst for more and more knowledge. We abandon what hasn’t worked and what has to construct brands that we know will stand up to changes in culture.

But a tough brand isn’t all it takes. You also need to have a certain type of vision towards your products that can see things from a different angle.

Building a Dynamic Product

It’s not uncommon for a product or service to have a primary or initial feature that most people use it for. And while that’s okay at first, you need to be able to expand the use cases of your product in order to be successful. Take Facebook for example, which at one point in its journey was used to rate the attractiveness of other students. If Zuckerberg hadn’t seen all the use-cases he could implement his concept in, we wouldn’t be talking about it today. This ability to see your product from different angles in different applications is vital to scaling your startup. But unfortunately, not every startup has that vision. Not at first at least.

It’s a vision that is acquired over time, from years of experience and trial and error. But if you don’t have any time to waste, a couple of ways to come up with a new use for your product include holding testing groups, doing acid in the desert, or holding testing groups while doing acid in the desert. In any case, whether or not you think you can build a brand for longevity and develop multiple ways to use your product, you have to be willing to take a chance.

Make the Leap

While it might be true that developing a brand for longevity and envisioning multiple functions for your product is important, sometimes all it takes to get your startup off the ground is taking a chance. Taking a chance on an idea. Taking a chance on a crazy campaign that has the potential to go viral. Or taking a chance on an Austin marketing firm, like us.

After just one brand positioning analysis, you’ll see that it’s the best chance you ever took. Investing in a marketing agency that invests itself in you. If you truly believe your startup is ready to grow, then we do too. Let’s get going.