What Is Growth?

A Founder's Take on the Most Misunderstood Word in Startups

Someone in my live Maven session yesterday asked a simple question:
“What is growth?”

At first, I gave a quick answer. But afterward, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Growth is a word we throw around constantly in startups, but how often do we stop to ask what it actually means?

Here’s how I’ve come to define it—especially for founders trying to lead growth before hiring a team.

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Growth Is Impact

At its core, growth is about impact.

When we launch a startup, we’ve usually identified a problem that others aren’t solving effectively. So, we build a solution.

Growth is our ability to scale that impact—to make our solution attractive for the people who need it, accessible so they can try it, and effective so that it truly solves their problem.

It's not just about acquisition metrics or conversion funnels. It's about reaching more people and making a meaningful difference in their lives—at scale.

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Why Growth Matters Early

In the early stages of a startup, growth is the ultimate measure of real progress.

You can spend months (or years) building a beautiful product. But unless you’re growing—unless more and more people are trying it, using it, and sticking with it—it’s hard to know if you’re really solving the problem.

That doesn’t mean growth comes first. You need to validate that your solution actually works. Maybe it solves the problem you intended to, or maybe it solves a different, equally important one. Either way, sustainable growth starts with impact.

And the best proof of that? Retention. If people stick around, you're onto something. If they don't, you probably aren’t.

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The Most Common Trap

One of the biggest traps I see—especially in venture-backed startups—is chasing numbers that look like growth, but aren’t.

You can temporarily inflate your metrics to show “traction”—to impress investors, rally your team, even fool yourself. But if people don’t keep using your product, it’s not real growth. It’s noise.

Another common mistake? Teams start “growing” before they’re ready.

Maybe they haven’t nailed product-market fit yet. Maybe their onboarding experience is confusing or broken. In those cases, growth isn’t just premature—it’s a distraction. You’re pouring water into a leaky bucket and calling it progress.

When growth is built on a solid foundation—real value, happy users, a smooth experience—it becomes sustainable. And that’s when things start to compound.

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Founders: You Can’t Outsource This

Here’s the hard truth: you can’t delegate growth early on.

As a founder, you need to lead the charge. Growth isn’t a marketing function or a hire you make once you raise your Series A. It’s the core of your business.

Eventually, yes—you’ll build a team. You’ll hand off ownership of different functions. But early on, you are the architect of the growth engine. You need to understand how it works, where it breaks, and what truly drives momentum.

If you’re not willing to own that responsibility, it’s going to be very hard to build a company that lasts.

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What Real Growth Looks Like

The best way to measure whether you have sustainable growth is to look at your retention cohorts.

It’s not enough to track signups. You need to see how many people come back—how many keep using your product because it genuinely solves their problem.

And make sure the starting point of your cohort analysis is based on real usage, not just account creation.

This is how you validate product-market fit. This is how you know your growth is real.

From there, you can start to scale. A high-momentum growth engine—fueled by retention, word of mouth, and constant experimentation—can create powerful compounding effects.

But it all starts with nailing the experience for the right users. Get that right, and the flywheel starts to turn.

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Final Thought

Growth isn’t just about going faster. It’s about confirming you’re headed in the right direction—and that what you’ve built truly matters.

As a founder, growth is how you turn impact into scale. If you get that right, everything else follows.