When is the right time to get a COO?

The main reason is everyone else sold or overreacted to the market and pivoted. Yammer sold for $1B+ to Microsoft but could've easily been a 30B+ market cap company. Slide had some issues and continue to react to the market trying different things - had they focused on a real problem, they might've created a Zynga type company. The rest of them (Dave @ 500 Startups, Jeremy at Yelp, etc) are still at it and the verdict isn't in. That being said, the fact that 1 company has an alumni with such success - and There's many I haven't mentioned - is only testament to the quality of the people. P.S. What's the market cap for Tesla? Elon is just getting started - I think I'll be WAY bigger than LinkedIn.

You have limit time and resources so you need to think what I call "FIRST DOLLAR" approach. If you look across different modes to sell and target there has to be a few that would be the optimal. Focus only on those first don't look elsewhere - put each next dollar of effort into these (or this one) until it's optimal then target the next bucket to attack until you get momentum to broaden. There has to be a few or one area that would harvest better or best results w you time. The idea here is to get the sales/revenue flywheel turning w focus or richest buckets of opportunity to create revenue momentum to allow you to scale. 1. Partnerships with those who sell into doctors - preferably similar Catagory (tech. IT. Time optimization. Software). 2. Work your customers and fuel the flames of referrals with those Dr using your product. Ask them "is there some one you can suggest that might also benefit from this?" A warm referral is sales gold. "Dr xxx suggested I show this to you". 3. hire college interns. Congrats on "going after it

First I would try to figure out why your conversion is not great. Also a level deeper finding out what a normal conversion rate in your market actually looks like. There are markets that have naturally low conversion rates - are you sure that yours is below market standard? If yes - this would be my first point of action. Increasing conversion to or above market standard. As long as you haven't done this you are not playing the market to its potential. If you are playing close to potential it might actually make sense to put more pressure on the pipeline because you seem to have a product that at least is average. If conversion is below market standard I would look deeper into the offering itself - it does not make sense to put pressure on the pipeline for a below average product. Whether diversification makes sense is a complex question. Production capabilities, costs per unit, cross & upselling potentials with your core offering etc. all needs to be taken into account. I personally prefer to establish the core product (the product I can produce and sell with a reasonable margin) first and then move on vertically. First step here is to iterate the offering (product core + services around it + pipeline leading to it....) to a good product-market fit. Last but not least - just talk to your customers. Why did they drop off? Whom did they choose and why? etc. etc. In the end everything you do is communicating with "the market" so the best thing you can focus on is to learn "how to properly listen to what the market tells you". From there you can derive most of the answers for your business. Hope that helps. Feel free to reach out in case of follow up questions or need for elaboration. All the best with your venture! Karl

Xero's subscription model helps them grow sustainably. They have trained and positioned Xero experts around the globe. The experts serve a region and sign up subscribers underneath them. By targeting professionals who may already have a client base that is in Xero's target market (for example, CPA's who advise startups or Bookkeepers who may be searching for something more user-friendly than Quickbooks) they have been able to scale quickly. It helps that their user interface is intuitive, as well.

Nichole's list is comprised of people who talk about growth marketing. Although growth marketing is a component of scaling-up, scaling a company is much more about operational issues. Everything from tech stack to culture to legal and compliance and almost always sales. On growth, there are a lot of people who talk about the principles of growth from a marketing perspective and a couple of people on Nichole's list are known for *talking* about growth but I'm generally wary of people who are more known for *talking* than actual notable accomplishments in growing products. Ivan Kirigin (formerly on Dropbox's growth team, now running a company I invested in called YesGraph), Gustaf Alstromer (AirBnb growth team), Elliot Shmukler (helped LinkedIn grow from 20m to 200m members, now in-charge of growth at Wealthfront who has been absolutely killing it), Drew Dillon (an early PM at Yammer, now Head of Product at AnyPerks), are all active on Twitter. Actually Elliot isn't but you can still search quotes he's made about growth via Twitter using his name. If you have more specific questions, am happy to try and point you to the right resources.