Common growth mistakes that SEA startups make and how to fix them

Picture this: Your startup is growing like wildfire, and you feel certain it will dominate Southeast Asian markets in no time.

But then, your growth stalls and panic ensues. Now what?

While this is a hypothetical scenario, many regional founders and operators I speak to have been in similar situations. I’ve been there too and learned some key lessons from the mistakes I made in handling that situation.

Image credit: Timmy Loen

A lot can get lost in the cracks when you’re moving fast. So when I work with startups today as a product and growth advisor, we first diagnose the top impediments to their growth.

Here are a few common mistakes I observe:

1. Weak retention

The startup’s cohort-based retention curves are declining instead of flattening or smiling.

In this case, there’s no point in growing the top of the funnel if there’s a “leaky bucket” further downstream. New customers you attract won’t stick around, anyway.

Other symptoms include poor word-of-mouth traffic and low customer satisfaction.

I once worked with a startup that was rolling out a product to reach a new customer segment. Despite a splashy marketing launch, it became obvious after a couple of months that customer churn was too high.

In response, the product team immediately went to work on closing gaps while the growth team paused their efforts to scale adoption.

Solution steps:

• Identify gaps between your customer needs and product value proposition.
• Fix these gaps quickly before scaling up customer acquisition.

2. Repeating ineffective tactics

It’s easy to fall into the trap of using the same growth tactics that have worked before. However, the reality is that what got you to this point won’t get you to the next milestone.

3. Vague customer segmentation

4. Overreliance on one customer acquisition channel

5. Underinvesting in the next S-curve