Growth Spurt vs. Growth Movements

Being a successful startup has typically understood as approaching growth at all costs. We constantly felt that it was fatal to allow any space for imitators and competitors to catch up, so we convinced ourselves to build more features on what already exists. We tweak, fine-tune, or perhaps created few more features rapidly, and then tried to convince people to view us as best products and services. This mode of thinking led us to fuel growth spurt on a weak foundation and bring our products and services to the market without the insight from the existing customers and prospective customers.

In contrast, Growth Movements focuses on sustainable scalability and to create rapid increments of improvements with potential to achieve hyper-growth with core principles firmly integrated and reiterated. This gives each movement the maximum potential to achieve rapid scale with the right types of growth strategies. The product or service that is born out of these movements strengthens the startup DNA to increase the essence of success.

This is how Jon Oringer founded Shutterstock in 2003. His company was born out of his frustration to find the quality art and photographs to use in his marketing for his website at a reasonable price. So armed with only a couple of thousand dollars and no real formal photography background, he then bought himself a good camera and filled his website he created with top 30,000 of his own images that he took by wandering the streets of his hometown, New York City. Today, Shutterstock, where he serves as CEO and chairman of the board, houses over 30 million photos, videos, and illustrations and video clips of 40,000 contributors from 100 countries. Unlike many technology companies, Shutterstock was founded with no initial outside investment. In addition to allowing him control, by refusing the cushion of outside funding, he was focused on profits from the very start - unlike giant tech companies such as Twitter and Foursquare. Even after a rapid growth and a successful IPO with a market cap of $3.6B, Shutterstock’s dedication to its strong core values – connecting contributors and buyers, maintaining the entrepreneurial employee culture – never diminished which is why it sets itself apart from its competitors.

Alternately on the other hand, Quora took incredible shortcuts to build its user base as fast as it could which resulted in loss of its core value. Quora’s mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge and aims to allow anyone to easily share their knowledge and in the process to dramatically increase the total amount of knowledge available to the world. As it grows it wants to be able to provide larger and larger audiences to writers, cover more and more topics, and have greater and greater impact on the world. What this meant for Quora is to build trust with people is the cornerstone of its brand and business growth. However, Quora decided to automatically opt users into showing everyone what they’re reading. This feature, added to entice the content consumption, resulted in loss of privacy and made its users implicit actions and activities public. This reckless manoeuvre to fuel the growth spurt has resulted in negative net effect for its growth spurt.

Growth movements, on the other hand leads to positive relational growth for the company and its customers as well as the interconnected entities within the company. Growth movements is not only about rapid growth, but it is also about enforcing the maximum growth by protecting the core values and principles, and at the same time strengthening the relationship between the entities that make up the startup DNA.