As a startup, speed is your superpower. You may not have the money and resources a larger company does, but you can move quicker and iterate faster. But how fast is too fast? Here are a couple of areas to consider:

Sales/Go-To-Market

Let’s say you have gotten some sales and want to ramp up a head of sales and additional sellers to grow the business. How many of your current customers were friendly introductions versus cold outreach? Has the founder done enough sales to know the right target customer, pitch, and value proposition? Is a go-to-market process in place that works (even at small scale) and can be replicated? Be careful moving too fast ramping up a sales team before an early GTM process (proven by the founder) is in place.

Raising money

Let’s say you have the opportunity to raise a decent amount of money; should you take it? This depends a lot on what path you want to take with the business, how you feel about the growth prospects, and how you plan on using the money. My bias would be if you know you can take $1 in and get $3-5 out because you are doing more of what already works that can be a good thing. But if you are raising money and using funds to “figure things out” with the sales, marketing, or product I find that can lead to more dilution and wasted money. In that case, try and self/customer fund longer until you get to that repeatable process and are ready to go faster.

Expanding to new markets

Let’s say you have physical locations or a product in a current geography. When should you be expanding to the next location/product/market? Expansion will shift focus, so be sure the current market is in a steady state that can somewhat stay on auto-pilot with the current process to get consistent results. If you feel the current market can stay in a good spot with less attention, then exploring new markets can be great. However, if you try to expand to new markets without a solid base in the current market, that can just exacerbate the problems in the current market.

While moving fast and breaking things before perfection can help a startup figure things out and iterate faster, moving too fast without a stable process can lead to additional distractions and complications for the business.