Hypergrowth playbook: 19 steps to repeat Hopin’s first 6 months of rapid scaling

One view of Hopin’s timeline looks like this:

• Hopin’s seed round, February 2020, $6.5M, 8 employees
• Hopin’s Series A, June 2020, $40M, 60 employees
• Hopin’s Series B, November 2020, $125M, 215 employees
• Hopin’s Series C, March 2021, $400M, 400 employees
• Hopin’s Series D, August 2021, $450M, 800 employees

All in all, Hopin has raised over $1 billion in two years.

19 steps done by Hopin in the first 6 months of rapid scaling:

1. Start with a visionary founder who is obsessed with product design, who is an engineer by trade, and who is a natural salesman. Most companies don’t even get past this first step. Hopin did because we have Johnny.
2. Hire just engineers as contractors and one other generalist entrepreneur who can write, sell, and help customers succeed.
3. Build a great product with a viral growth loop built into it.
4. Work closely with key ICPs to shape your product roadmap. Remember that the market you start out serving may not be the market you end up dominating in. With Hopin, we began with solopreneurs, boutique agencies, and influencers but accelerated upmarket quickly.
5. Hire more engineers.
6. Sign your first annual contracts to anchor desirable customers.
7. Begin talking with investors about a pre-seed or seed round.
8. Hire a customer success person, a support person, and a salesperson with a proclivity for ops.
9. Launch in early access. Build a waitlist, letting in customers slowly. Use a lean marketing tech stack like Hubspot CRM, Zapier, Stripe, and Typeform. This waitlist is your community. StreamYard has an amazing blueprint for building a community of raving fans.
10. Get customer permissions to use recognizable logos and publish select case studies with good logos and/or numbers. These case studies reflect back to the market the type of customers you are built for (i.e., enterprise vs. SMBs)
11. Hire a PR firm to build buzz.
12. Hire more engineers. Begin to focus on organization, product management, and start to work with GTM on a customer-friendly product release process. Hire a product marketer. ARWAG. Always Release With A GIF.
13. Scale the sales team to do demos and close more deals. Bring in a business operations (biz ops) leader.
14. Scale the success and support teams. The better the product, the smaller these should be. The more complicated the product, the larger these teams need to be. Also, in hyperscaling, support content becomes outdated fast so build in a process for keeping it fresh and up to date.
15. You should be working with 5+ agencies by now to outsource most of your marketing efforts (brand, creative, paid ads, SEO, content, events, and PR). Write clear briefs. Bring vendors into Slack. Be quick to move on from agencies who are not good fits.
16. Experiment with pricing. Where do you want to be in the market compared to competitors? Ideally, you can offer a free version that has your branding watermarked somewhere (feed the viral growth loop). Also, always be working on the next plan up.
17. Leverage community feedback (a Facebook group is fine) and user surveys (HotJar is great) for identifying the must-have features that will move customers up to the next plan.
18. Product/market fit is when growth numbers are up and to the right WoW for a dependable amount of time. The waitlist should be swelling. Customers should be regularly writing happy reviews, if not, incentivize them, getting you to the top of the review sites where your customers are researching products.
19. Couple the launch with your Series A announcement, directing traffic to your first customer event where you announce a flagship feature.

Origin: https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/hyperscaling-hopin-fc457e48886f