Stages of a Startup Lifecycle | Minute Mentor

For the Minute Mentor, I wanted to tell those that are listening the things that I tell entrepreneurs all the time, and that is that there are 7 stages to the life cycle, to the startup life cycle. In the studies that I've done, it was really difficult to narrow down and create the startup life cycle because there is so much random information out there. So the stages are vision, product, go-to-market, standardization, optimization, growth, and exit. The reason why they're in that order, the first one is obvious, right? You have to have a vision and you have to validate that vision. The next one is you have to have your product and validate your product. That's like your go-to-market and all that stuff. Then you go into the actual go-to-market. This is where you've already validated your product market fit and you're getting into your go-to-market. You've already done some testing and you're going for it. Up to here, people seem to agree. Where people seem to get lost after that is the idea of standardization. What I mean by standardization is where you create simple, very simple, in layman's terms, plain speak, the way that the business and its departments should be run run through best practices. Best practices make it so that everybody's doing the right thing, which is necessary in order to do optimization, which is the next idea in the lifecycle, the next stage. So now you're going from standardizing things. Now you're going into optimizing things and then you go into growth. Otherwise, which is something that a lot of the VCs and private equity do, is they send you straight from go-to-market into growth. A lot of companies put themselves out of business because they haven't standardized, so they haven't created ways to optimize operations to make it so that you scale up. And this is where you get economies of scale. You head into growth, if you haven't figured that stuff out, then you're making the problem worse by growing. You're growing the problem, and that creates a lot of substantial problems for you. It could put you out of business. I've almost gone out of business by growing. I've seen a lot of other businesses go out of business through growth because they haven't done standardization, and therefore they haven't done optimization, and therefore they haven't done economies of scale. And then after growth, you can move into your exit. I hope this was helpful.