If You Want Your Startup To Grow, Understand What You Can Control
An afterthought from this week’s Teaching Startup newsletter
In this week’s issue of Teaching Startup, I answered an entrepreneur’s question about customer acquisition costs (CAC) and how much of a reduction in those costs might be expected as a new startup expands its market.
It was a good question. It was a tough question. I struggled with it, and in the end, I had to reframe it in order to answer it. I couldn’t get past the fact that expectations imply something that happens that’s out of the founder’s control.
And that’s what I want to talk about in the post: How important it is for an entrepreneur to understand what’s in their control and what isn’t.
What outcomes can you determine?
I’m not an academic, but I am a long-time entrepreneur with a varied history of companies, products, roles, skill-sets, and experiences. In all of those experiences — good and bad — customer acquisition costs, as a metric, is something the team has a lot of control over.
Admittedly, there’s the part of that equation where the conversion has to happen, and that’s not something that can be flipped like a switch. But there are plenty of switches, sliders, and knobs…
