Startup Growth Stack Components

Problem To Solve

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When it comes to Growth, early-stage founders are often focused on solving an immediate problem at hand and are not fully aware of the effects of today’s decisions on their company’s short- and medium-term Growth trajectory. This usually manifests by taking the least resource intensive path when it comes to anything but Product until a fundraising event, and then going back and attempting to patch up the Growth motion afterward.

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In the past, this behavior made sense because building out a sophisticated Sales & Marketing function and the Data function necessary to power it was expensive. But this is no longer the case and today’s top startups build their Growth motion from Day 1.

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The problem you want to solve when considering your early-stage Growth stack is “What can I do today to build out my company’s Growth motion in an efficient, DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) way?”

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This post will attempt to answer that question in a concise, generalized way that applies to most software startups.

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Growth Stack Components

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Startup growth is the result of sustained iterative learning. Learning is the result of a cyclical pattern of observation, questioning, experimentation, and analysis. The Growth Stack is a set of tools that enables your startup to learn as quickly as possible.

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An early-stage startup Growth Stack generally consists of:

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1. Cloud Data Warehouse - Snowflake, BigQuery, etc
2. ETL software - Fivetran, Stitch, HighTouch, etc
3. Customer Data Platform - Segment, Amplitude, Rudderstack, etc
4. Product Analytics software - Amplitude, Mixpanel, etc
5. Web Analytics software - Google Analytics, Optimizely, etc
6. Data Visualization software - Lookr, SiSense, Domo, etc
7. Marketing Automation software - Customer.io, Hubspot, Iterable, etc
8. Outbound Sales software - Outreach, Apollo, Hubspot, etc
9. Advertising software - Google Ads, Facebook Ads, TikTok Ads, etc
10. CRM software - SalesForce, Pipedrive, Hubspot, etc
11. Customer Support software - Zendesk, Intercom, FreshDesk, etc

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As you can see, the Growth Stack is a comprehensive set of component tools. The commonality shared by all of these tools is that they enable the capture or storage of data about potential and/or active users of your product. Combined with an experienced hand or group of hands capable of asking good questions, setting up good tests, and running solid analyses these tools will accelerate the rate of learning, and thus growth, at your company.

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To be clear, your goal as a founder is not to build out every tool or set of tools to maximum sophistication. Rather, it is to select the tools you need in the short- and medium-term and build those out with minimal sophistication to start, but in such a way that you are capturing and storing the data you need to run the analyses necessary to iteratively drill into what is making your business grow until you grow enough to swap out the component software itself.

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Additional Benefit

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Another benefit of setting up a cohesive Growth Stack is that, when done properly, all of your tooling will work together in a fairly seamless way. The customer data in your CRM will match what’s in your Marketing Automation software, for example. (In case this seems like a trivially simple task, I assure you that it is harder than it should be and an entire cottage industry of CRM consultants thrives on this fact.)

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Cost of Setup

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The cost to set up a Growth stack to minimal sophistication is likely to be in the tens of thousands of dollars, and could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on who you employ to help you and how quickly and effectively they work.

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Regardless, however, the value that a well-tooled Growth stack unlocks is nearly priceless, and can often be the difference between quicker success versus slow, grinding failure for an early-stage company.

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At Pacaya, we offer Growth Setup starting at $25k and Total Growth starting at $55k. The cost savings to you are in hours saved by your team and generally sum in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the complexity and duration of a project.