Jay Sen – CEO JV Capital | 4X Founder, 2X Exits | Investor & Strategic Advisor | AI/ML Innovator Driving Startup Growth.
Scaling a startup is every founder’s dream. But it’s also the stage where most startups break.
It’s not due to a lack of ambition or effort. It’s because they scale the wrong things at the wrong time—often with a foundation that isn’t built to scale.
They confuse growth with scalability. Growth is getting more customers. Scalability is getting more customers without your costs, complexity or chaos growing at the same rate.
True scalability is when your systems, team and product all reinforce each other, not strain under success.
As both a founder and an investor backing early-stage startups, I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. These are the hard-earned lessons that I’ve learned over the years that I share with every founder I mentor:
Start with a real problem, not a cool idea.
It’s tempting to chase exciting ideas. But ideas don’t scale. Pain does.
According to a CBInsights report, 35% startups fail because their product has no market need. And it was the second most common startup failure reason in their analysis.
A scalable startup starts with real, painful problems. Problems so painful that users are okay paying to solve it. And that’s how you achieve the Product-Market Fit (PMF).
So, before you build, talk to your potential users. Reach out directly and say, “I’m building [Product X] to solve [Problem X]. Would that help you?”
If the majority respond with genuine enthusiasm, offer to try it, or even request to pay, you’re likely on the right track.
Don’t scale before achieving product-market fit.
Validation is not enough. You need PMF before you scale.
PMF is basically a stage when your product is solving a real problem, and your users keep coming back for more. Without PMF, scaling is just accelerating failure.
It usually takes 18-24 months for startups to reach PMF after launching their first MVP. But some take longer, depending on their market, competition, and more.
You’ll know you’re approaching PMF when you get consistent usage and retention without chasing users. You’ll have users opting for the longer billing period, such as a year or two.
Investors often look for real usage, not forced adoption—signs that users would truly miss the product if it disappeared.
Sean Ellis’s advice for startups to check whether they’ve achieved PMF is quite the same. He asks startups to run a PMF survey and ask their users, “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?”
If 40%+ users respond “very disappointed,” you’ve found PMF. Sean came up with this magical number after benchmarking nearly 100 startups.
To reach that number, you have to:
• Talk to users and focus on their problem, not your solution.
• Launch fast and learn from user behavior.
• Iterate based on usage, not just feedback.
Most importantly, don’t confuse interest with traction. Until users are coming back, paying, or referring, you’re probably not ready to scale.
Build an MVP that doesn’t break under growth.
Most MVPs (Minimum Viable Product) are created so duct-taped that they can’t be scaled later.
I get it. You’ve got time constraints. But MVP is not a hacked-together version of your product. It is the simplest version of your product that delivers real value.
A good MVP is focused and essential. It solves one painful problem, for one type of user, in one clear way. Nothing more.
You need to build just enough to learn, but on tech that can evolve when needed. Avoid overcommitting to anything that doesn’t scale well with complexity. Hardcoded logics, tangled no-code automations, etc., are a big no.
And even in your MVP, keep the frontend, backend and data handling logic separate. This allows you to build on top of what you already have, not start afresh.
Find and nail a scalable distribution channel.
Many startups die not because the product failed, but because it never reached enough of the right users.
This is one of the biggest problems—most startups take quite a long time to understand their target audience. They should be aware of their target audience from their very first day.
Knowing your audience makes it easy to pick the right distribution channels for marketing materials.
For example, for a tech startup, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube, paired with SEO, are likely the best channels. Alternatively, for a fashion startup, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube might be the right channels.
The goal is not to chase every channel. Find the ones that work, go deep and let them compound over time.
Investors aren’t looking for a viral moment. They’re looking for a repeatable, cost-effective growth engine.
Build a retention machine, not just an acquisition engine.
Acquisition is exciting. You run a campaign, see the users increasing, and it feels like growth.
But real, compounding growth doesn’t come from one-time wins. It comes from users who stay, use the product often and bring others in over time.
Retention is what makes growth sustainable and your startup investable. Without it, you’re burning time, money and momentum—all for short-term vanity metrics.
Your product must deliver value early and repeatedly. The first experience should create a clear, meaningful impact. It should solve your customer’s problem in the easiest way possible.
Retention also improves your unit economics, increasing lifetime value (LTV), reducing payback period and signaling real product-market fit to investors.
Final Thoughts
Scalability isn’t a phase you enter; it’s a discipline you practice from day one. It’s baked into how you think about the problem, how you build the product, how you reach users and how you keep them.
The founders who build scalable startups don’t chase growth; they build engines. They say no more than they say yes. They focus on getting one thing working really, really well, then they scale that.
Whether you’re just starting or already growing, ask yourself regularly: If this 10x’d tomorrow, would it break?
If the answer is yes, you know what to fix next.
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