Intro to growth catalysts

Alright, welcome to the final portion of Part Two! Your growth foundation is nearly set, and we're very close to moving into Part Three of the program, where we'll begin architecting and ultimately bring your growth engine to life. But before we do that, one final very important layer of your foundation... and that's Growth Catalysts.

So let's get into it.

At Demand Curve, we spend a significant amount of time trying to reverse-engineer and understand at a fundamental level what separates startups that grow from those that struggle to gain traction and get off the ground. And as you know, that's largely what our Foundational Five framework helps us to understand.

But there's something that the Foundational Five framework doesn't fully explain, and that's outsized growth. And to be clear, when we say outsized, we mean a combination of:

• Velocity — overall rate of growth on both short and long time frames
• Magnitude — the ultimate scale it reaches (users, revenue, enterprise value)
• Durability — how long the growth persists without stalling
• Defensibility — the compounding moat that makes the advantage hard to copy

On the one hand, the F5 framework does explain a significant portion of it. The tighter our alignments, the faster we’d expect to grow. Layer on our market size and quality, and we get a reasonable estimate of the ceiling for growth.

But again, we’re talking about the outliers here. There are a ton of companies with great fundamentals that aren’t setting any growth records.

Now, some may claim that outsized success is simply explained by having phenomenal product-market fit. But as we briefly covered in the Product-Market Fit lesson, that doesn’t tell the complete story.

Others might point to the “blue ocean” concept. Essentially creating “soft” (little to no competition) untapped markets. But that’s also baked in to the “good market” component of the PMF conditions that must be true, especially for outlier casee of growth.

And this line of thinking is what brings us to the concept of Growth Catalysts—the real answer to this puzzle (or at least a more comprehensive one). 

In this lesson, we're going to give you an overview of the Growth Catalysts that we've observed most commonly in the wild, and ultimately, we're hoping to help you find Growth Catalysts that may exist in the DNA of your business today. Or, at the least, to get you thinking about catalysts that you may be able to engineer into your foundation over time.