Getting a startup off the ground is exhilarating but also challenging. After the initial excitement wears off, many entrepreneurs find themselves stuck or “frozen” at some point. Their early momentum grinds to a halt, and they’re not sure how to get things moving again. Unfreezing your startup requires refocusing on your core mission, tending to the foundations, and making a few key adjustments to propel growth.
Why do startups get frozen?
There are a few common reasons that forward progress can stall out for a young company:
- Loss of focus – The business lacks a clear direction or vision. Trying to be everything to everyone can freeze innovation and expansion.
- Money problems – Insufficient funding or cash flow issues put operations in a holding pattern.
- Team troubles – Core team members become disengaged, burn out or leave the company.
- Lack of traction – Difficulty acquiring customers or users leads to stagnation.
- Failure to pivot – An inability to adapt the product, marketing, or business model to changing market conditions.
- Growing pains – Organizational structures or processes are not scaling with business growth.
The good news is that identifying the specific issues holding your startup back allows you to take targeted action to get back on track.
Refocus on your core mission and customers
Revisiting your core mission and target audience helps outline the critical tasks needed to unfreeze operations. Ask yourself:
- Who is our customer? Get ultra-clear on ideal customer demographics, common pain points, and reasons to buy your offering.
- What is our core mission? Refine your purpose and central focus as a company if needed.
- Why does our product/service matter? Determine the key benefits and value you provide customers.
- How can we deliver more value? Identify ways to better solve customer problems and improve their experience.
This market validation and refinement process centers your team on the true north of product-market fit. The path forward starts coming into focus once you reconfirm who you serve and why it matters.
Strengthen your foundation
Getting back to basics on a few foundational startup elements provides stability to then layer growth on top of:
- Leadership team – Rally and align executives around the core mission. Address any conflicts or communication issues.
- Employee engagement – Reinvigorate staff, especially early employees, with the startup vision. Improve company culture and morale.
- Funding and cash reserves – Extend runway by reducing expenses, raising more capital, and improving financial practices and reporting.
- Product roadmap – Revisit the product development map and priority features to optimize for customer value.
- Process improvement – Refine internal systems and operations that may no longer be working at current scale.
Don’t let foundational elements crumble while you look ahead to rapid growth. A strong leadership team, capital foundation, excellent product, and efficient operations enable startups to regain momentum.
Adjust and experiment to gain traction
With your core mission and foundational elements re-focused, here are some key adjustments to get unstuck and propel growth:
Iteration speed
Increase iteration and testing velocity to unlock product-market fit. Release minimum viable products faster to validate ideas with real customer data vs getting stuck on a theoretical perfect product.
Target market
Re-evaluate your beachhead target market – the specific segment you can dominate initially before expanding outward. Sharpen your positioning and messaging to penetrate this segment.
Pricing model
If traction is lagging, experiment with pricing and packaging tactics like free trials, freemium tiers, bundled options, or discounts to incentivize adoption.
Sales process
Assess sales workflow pain points and address weak spots through training, tools, new hires, or revised pipelines. Increase qualified lead generation.
Marketing channels
Double down on marketing channels showing results. Pull back on ineffective areas. Test new channels to cost-effectively scale lead gen and conversions.
Product capabilities
Using customer insights, identify priority feature gaps to fill that will directly drive adoption, retention and revenue.
Strategic partnerships
Pursue mutually beneficial partnerships with channel partners, influencers and strategic integrations to expand reach.
Rapid controlled experimentation around these growth levers will reveal what resonates in-market and gets momentum building again.
Maintain relentless focus
As strategies start gaining traction, it takes relentless focus to sustain momentum and avoid backsliding into startup stagnation. Some tips to maintain focus:
- Set quarterly goals and key results (OKRs) centered on growth initiatives.
- Track weekly progress on growth goals using cascading metrics.
- Automate and streamline busywork activities for efficiency.
- Keep team priorities, roles and metrics aligned to objectives.
- Celebrate small wins but avoid complacency after initial success.
The work is not done once you’ve kickstarted growth. Maintaining focus prevents you from chasing too many directions at once or being distracted by “busywork”.
Bring in outside help
Not every startup has all the specialized expertise needed in-house to get unstuck. Outside help from mentors, advisors, agencies, or consultants can provide an objective viewpoint along with strategic guidance and support. Areas where outside experts can augment startup teams include:
- Business strategy: Refining models and growth plans.
- Leadership coaching: Developing founders and executive presence.
- Marketing campaigns: Crafting messaging and digital/social initiatives.
- Brand positioning: Optimizing brand identity and materials.
- Sales process: Designing sales funnels and collateral.
- Talent recruitment: Attracting A-players especially later stage.
A neutral outside advisor provides valuable perspective. Targeted engagements with agencies or specialists add horsepower to accelerate results. Just be selective in who you bring in to maintain alignment with company vision and culture.
Know when to pivot
Despite best efforts, sometimes startups still end up hitting a wall and stalling out. Drastic measures like a pivot could be required to change direction. Look for these potential pivot signals:
- Core hypotheses are invalidated concerning product, pricing, customer, market, etc.
- Competition changed or intensified unexpectedly.
- Market conditions or technology shifted substantially.
- Regulatory constraints emerged impeding model.
- Business is capital intensive with low margins.
- Unit economics do not work even at scale.
Don’t cling to a sinking ship out of pride. Be ready to pivot to an entirely revised model or approach if the current path appears doomed after sufficient testing. Pivots give startups a renewed chance at finding product-market fit.
Know when to persist
Contrastingly, don’t pivot prematurely at the first roadblock either. Many seemingly “stuck” startups fight through short-term challenges, make adjustments, and end up succeeding over the long-term. Signs you may just need to persist through tough times:
- Customer validation is still strong with problem-solution fit.
- Market opportunity remains intact or growing.
- Unit economics work but more scale needed.
- Internal leadership alignment and commitment persists.
- Cash reserves are adequate for 6-12 months.
Carefully weigh whether pivoting or staying the course makes the most sense for your current situation. Don’t throw away promising business models prematurely.
Conclusion
Freezing up is a common challenge faced by startups at some point. Getting momentum and growth back requires refocusing on fundamentals, making smart adjustments, bringing in help, and objectively assessing whether to persist or pivot. With dedicated work unfreezing your startup, you can get progress moving ahead at full speed again.