Your startup has passed the early stages. Now what?

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Cat is a TIA Star Contributor and publishes exclusive, high-value content that serves the Asian tech community. Read more from TIA Star Contributors here.

It’s a wonderful moment when your business starts to take off. You discover your product-market fit, customers love the brand, qualified leads roll in, clients come on board, and the team culture is coming together. You might have even been brave enough to turn your mobile off for a couple of hours. But now that the early-stage party is over, what’s next?

Sustaining growth will be the next challenge. Here are four lessons to keep teams focused on what works as you start to scale.

1. Be consistent and add +1

Marketing is part science and art. Each business is building their own magical growth formula to connect and acquire customers. Once you’ve cracked this formula, I’ve found it’s consistency that gives you the biggest gains.

I recently worked with a brand that was looking for a more innovative go-to-market strategy. Their current marketing mix was a healthy blend of search, content marketing, and events, which was driving consistent demo requests and qualified leads. It was working.

My brief was to uncover a more exciting way to go-to-market. The risk in this question was shifting the current marketing team away from what was working to engage new customers. I’ve seen this a lot with marketers too: they get bored with what they’re doing or have a fear of “wearing out.”

The pragmatic solution for this was to select one new innovative approach to test each month. This had to be something that the brand hadn’t done before—anything from using a new channel to working with new partners.

The +1 ideas came from a pool of ideas the team shared in a Google doc the month prior. As a collective, they selected the new idea to prep and test the following month. This gave the team enough space to play with new ideas without being distracted from what was currently driving acquisition. For example, they could test a new partner webinar while still keeping inbound content and emails going.

Tip: If you’ve cracked the formula, keep at it. Don’t lose focus with a shiny new approach.

2. Improve with meaningful testing

I love data and A/B testing. However, unless you have a beautifully resourced team with a limitless budget, it’s important to focus on why and what you are optimizing.

I recently worked with a client that was A/B testing multiple elements of their marketing mix—email headlines, SEO keywords, paid search, website CTAs, gated or non-gated content, and Facebook ads. This is awesome if you have a big team but tougher to do with a lean one.

The challenge the team faced was finding time to apply the learnings from these tests. Because there was so much testing, it was hard to understand what to change. Most importantly, there also wasn’t enough traffic moving through each test to make a call on a meaningful action.

We came to a more realistic solution: choosing up to three key areas to optimize each week. This was done on existing campaigns or assets. The team huddled on a weekly basis to discuss optimization and the results in the context of the overall pipeline. This focus on testing led to more growth and less effort, as it meant they had the resources to take action and improve.

3. Automate only when you know what works

4. Ask and listen to customers every day