Stages Of Start-Up Life Cycle

The goal of a start-up is to figure out the right thing to build, the thing customers want and will pay for as quickly s possible. The main aim is to build a repeatable, scalable and profitable business model, on the way to this goal a start-up will go through a few phases.

1. Discovery


Purpose: Start-ups are focused on validating whether they are solving a real problem and whether and whether anybody would be interested in their solution.


Events: Founding team is formed, many customer interviews are conducted, value proposition is found, minimum viable product is created, team joins an accelerator or incubator, friends and family funding round, first mentors and advisors come on board.


Time: 5-7 months


2. Validation


Purpose: Start-ups are looking to get early validation that people are interested in their product through the exchange of money or attention.


Events: refinement of core features, initial user growth, metrics and analytics implementation, seed funding, first key hires, pivots (if necessary), first paying customers, product market fit.


Time: 3-5 months


3. Efficiency


Purpose: Star-ups refine their business model and improve the efficiency of their customer acquisition process. Star-ups should be able to efficiently acquire customers in order to avoid scaling with a leaky bucket.


Events: Value proposition refined, user experience overhauled, conversion funnel optimized, viral growth achieved, repeatable sales process and/or scalable customer acquisition channels found.


Time: 5-6 months


4. Scale


Purpose: Start-ups step on pedal and try to drive growth very aggressively.


Events: large A round, massive customer acquisition, back-end scalability improvements, first executive hires, process implementation, establishment of departments.


Time: 7-9 months




"The primary objective of a start-up is to validate its business model hypothesis (and iterate and pivot until it does), then it moves into execution mode. It's at this point the business needs an operating plan, financial forecasts and other well-understood management tools. "- Steve Blank