There’s lots of startup advice floating around. I’m going to give you a very practical one that’s often missed — how to plan your early growth. The seed round is usually devoted to finding your product-market fit, meaning you start with no or little product and should end with a demonstrably retentive and growing population of users. It’s this growth stretch that I’ll tell you how to plan — and once you do that, you’ll have a clear timeline for your seed:

周围有很多启动建议。 我将为您提供一个经常被人错过的非常实用的方法-如何计划您的早期成长。 种子轮通常致力于找到适合您的产品市场的产品，这意味着您一开始就没有产品或只有很少的产品，并且应该以明显的保持性和不断增长的用户群体结束。 我将告诉您如何规划增长—一旦这样做，您将为种子设定明确的时间表 ：

While there are differences, Series A is broadly raised when you have early traction, evaluated through growth rates and ARR or potentially-monetizable userbase.

尽管存在差异，但您可以通过增长速度 ， ARR或潜在可获利的用户群进行评估，从而广泛提高A系列的价值。

• What’s a good userbase? One that could or is generating about $1M ARR.什么是好的用户群？ 一个可能或正在产生约100万美元的ARR。
• Why $1M ARR? Because your series A will be in the vicinity of $10M valuation, and x10 is generally the multiple used at this stage. There are many variations, but rarely order-of-magnitude ones.为什么要有100万美元的ARR？ 因为您的A系列估值将在1000万美元附近，所以x10通常是此阶段使用的倍数。 有很多变化，但数量级很少。

• What’s a good growth rate? Paul Graham says 5%-7% w/w and David Sacks says 15%-20% per month (which is slightly slower). You can easily find 100 other benchmarks for the numbers above on Twitter and VC blogs/podcasts — but unless you’re going into investment, there’s no use spending so much time on that, just use these numbers as a guide and then do your best.

  好的增长率是多少？ 保罗·格雷厄姆( Paul Graham) 表示，重量百分比为5％-7％ ，大卫·萨克斯( David Sacks )则为每月15％-20％ (稍慢)。 您可以在Twitter和VC博客/播客上轻松找到上述数字的其他100个基准-但是，除非您要进行投资，否则花太多时间在上面是没有用的，只需将这些数字用作指导，然后尽力而为。

Taken together, all these numbers mean this is how your seed growth plan should look like: You raised enough capital for X months, say 18. Just before that money runs out you better start raising your Series A with traction at around $1M ARR. Maybe you’d like a 3-month buffer to raise and in case you miss your growth goals. With a growth rate of 5% w/w, how long does it take to make $1M ARR? Should you start at month 12 after your Seed? Or month 3? How long does that leave you to reach PMF? What if you missed the start of growth by a few months, how fast do you need to grow now to catch up? How many users does that mean you need to bring every week? This simple interactive model will answer all of these questions. (this is on grid.is which makes spreadsheets interactive. I am unaffiliated with them, I just like the tool).

综上所述，所有这些数字都意味着您的种子成长计划应该是这样的：您筹集了足够的资金用于X个月，例如18。 也许您希望增加3个月的缓冲时间，以防您错过增长目标。 如果增长率为5％w / w，则需要多长时间才能实现100万美元的ARR？ 您应该在种子发布后的第12个月开始吗？ 还是第3个月？ 那要等多久才能达到PMF？ 如果您错过了几个月的增长起点，您现在需要多快才能赶上增长呢？ 这意味着您每周需要带多少用户？ 这个简单的交互式模型将回答所有这些问题。 (这是在grid.is上，它使电子表格具有交互性。我不喜欢它们，就像工具一样)。

To use it, you fill in your target end date (3 months before you run out of cash, so you need to raise your next round). Put in a starting amount of users you will get from your first blast/launch (perhaps users in your waiting list or a major first push — like 100 or so). Then, set your goal number of users, and what your predicted weekly churn rate is. Only then, start playing with the ‘Start on field’. What happens if you give yourself 4 months to grow? Is that a realistic growth rate or will you need to hit rarely seen >10% w/w growth? How about 10 months? Do you have 10+3 months left your runway or should you start growth against weekly goals today?

要使用它，请填写您的目标结束日期(现金用尽前3个月，因此您需要提高下一轮)。 录入您将从第一次爆炸/启动中获得的起始用户数量(也许在您的等待列表中或主要的首次推送中的用户-例如100左右)。 然后，设置您的目标用户数以及预计的每周用户流失率。 只有这样，才能开始使用“开始比赛”。 如果您给自己四个月的成长时间会怎样？ 这是一个现实的增长率，还是您需要实现罕见的> 10％w / w的增长率？ 10个月怎么样？ 您是否还有10 + 3个月的时间要走，还是今天应该按照每周目标开始增长？

You can find a table that gives you the exact week-by-week goals for growth that you can just print and share with your team. You can put in how much did you actually realize every week and are you ahead or behind goal. Focusing just on this, as Paul Graham says, will guide you to success or to a better idea for your startup.

您可以找到一张表格，该表格可以为您提供每周确切的增长目标，您可以打印并与团队共享。 您可以输入您实际上每周实际实现了多少，以及您在目标之前还是之后。 正如Paul Graham所说的那样，专注于此将指导您成功或为您的创业提供更好的主意。

Focusing on hitting a growth rate reduces the otherwise bewilderingly multifarious problem of starting a startup to a single problem. — P. Graham

专注于达到增长速度，将原本令人难以置信的繁杂问题从启动初创企业简化为单个问题。 — P. Graham

This model is the basic one, and you can go fancy and add more options — splitting out by organic and paid growth, by channel, or adding in varying revenue; You can easily model some low and capped virality (e.g, every person might lead to up to 3 more people with 15% probability). Feel free to reach out to me for the Excel to build these over, and I’d especially love to learn if this changed something about how you planned your seed round. The screenshots above are from the interactive model.

该模型是基本模型，您可以看中并添加更多选项-按自然增长和有偿增长，按渠道划分或增加收入； 您可以轻松地模拟一些低强度的病毒(例如，每个人可能以15％的概率导致多至3个人)。 请随时与我联系以使用Excel构建这些副本，我尤其想了解这是否改变了您计划种子轮的方式。 上面的屏幕截图来自交互式模型 。