Starting a new business is never without risk, but in the last few turbulent years of the pandemic and the ensuing turbulence, the risks have felt that much higher. Beyond the staple stresses of cash flow costs and competition, what are the biggest worries keeping new startup founders awake at night fas they steer their fledgling startups to growth, and how are they overcoming them?
Scaling without losing a sense of purpose
Growth is exciting, but how do startups scale without compromising their core mission? Launched last year, Pyxi is a social network dedicated to overcoming the modern epidemic of digital loneliness. Having lived and worked in multiple countries, founder Alexandra Kasseri was always confident in building social networks in new places. “However, during my last stop in Singapore in 2020, something felt different, not just for me, but for many others,” he says. “Socializing had become harder, even in a vibrant city.”
Research confirmed what he was experiencing: the average person now spends hours more alone per day than they did 20 years ago. He made it his goal to help people, especially younger, digital-native generations, build social fitness, reduce screen time, and rediscover the benefits of in-person interactions.
However, he also knew that growing Pyxi without the right foundations presented a risk of diluting the platform’s impact and compromising the authenticity of connections. A rushed expansion could also impact user experience, partnerships, and trust. To mitigate the risk, Kasseri has focused on sustainable, thoughtful growth, ensuring that every new market entered strengthens their core mission.
He says: “In the U.K., we are scaling strategically through partnerships with venues, sports and cultural associations, corporations, and local communities, while keeping municipalities as valuable allies. Rather than chasing rapid expansion, we’re leveraging new technology that helps event organizers consistently drive traction to their venues, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem of engagement.”
Content creation
The importance of timely, impactful content is something all founders are mindful of, so much so that many feel that they need to be full-time content creators as well as business leaders. Fraser Wilson, founder of skincare company dussl, admits to regularly being kept awake at night thinking of content ideas or dissecting ideas from the day and why they have or haven’t gained traction.
With a background in marketing, he has focused on doing as much content creation himself as possible, as well as working with some UGC creators and influencers. He says: “I have created a marketing plan and calendar, and I spend time researching what other brands in adjacent industries are doing and then finding an angle for my own content. I also look at my content mix and optimized posting times.”
Wilson quickly realized that the solution lay in effective time planning. He now devotes one morning a week to planning, i.e., research, ideation, and creation, and spends evenings looking at brands and influencers to see what’s gaining traction.
“It’s best to be prepared but to have space for being reactive; if you want to get on any trends, you need to act quickly,” he says. “I’ve learned to get more comfortable with moving fast, even though my perfectionist nature wants to wait until the content is 100% perfect. As long as it represents the brand well and is high quality it’s good to go.”
Relying on a single high-value client
In the early stages, many startups succeed fairly quickly by working with prominent clients. While this helps to build significant revenue streams, it also creates a false sense of security.
This was the case for SocialProfit, an affiliate network connecting influencers with brands. Founder Adam Mlamali says: “When you have a handful of high-performing clients, it’s easy to assume that revenue will remain stable. However, influencer priorities can shift overnight, whether due to changes in their management, strategic pivots, or personal reasons.”
Not long after its launch in December 2023, the business learned this lesson the hard way when one of its top partners, who contributed a substantial percentage of their revenue, decided to step away from affiliate marketing.
“This highlighted the urgent need to diversify our client base rather than relying on a few high-value partners,” says Mlamali. “However, diversifying our client portfolio without spreading ourselves too thin has been a strategic challenge, and we have tackled this by focusing on specific sub-industries within affiliate marketing. Once we establish a stronghold in a particular niche, we carefully expand into adjacent industries, ensuring we maintain depth before seeking breadth.”
SocialProfit also uses AI-driven insights to help affiliates optimize their campaigns, ensuring that even newer or smaller affiliates can succeed, reducing its dependence on a few large clients. Mlamali adds: “Today, no single client accounts for more than 10-15% of our total revenue, a significant improvement from our early days when some partnerships contributed up to 50%.”
Retaining talent
In the early excitement of the startup stage, galvanizing a new team with a vision and mission is relatively easy. However, building and growing a business requires daily discipline and management of growing pains. Keeping the team excited and focused beyond the honeymoon period requires a different skill set and motivation.
Camilo Buscaron is CEO of ALAFIA, which provides supercomputers that perform real-time analysis and visualization of large and complex patient records at a clinicians’ desk side, making it accessible to every developer, doctor, and scientist in the world.
Founded in 2023, it has a team of 22 people, including a core team of doctors and engineers and an extended manufacturing team alongside the company’s partners, suppliers and collaborators.
Buscaron says: “Good companies are nothing but a collection of talented individuals doing their best work on behalf of customers. Human ingenuity makes it such that talented individuals will always look for opportunities to work on new creative ideas that challenge their skill set.”
However, he adds, projects have to be manageable and fit within all their other life’s priorities such as family, friends, and experiences. As long as they are given overarching goals, without making constraints and supervision too restrictive, talented individuals rise to their full potential and are less likely to look for new opportunities elsewhere.
One lesson that new startup founders must learn is to balance performance and delivery and walk a fine line between stress and pressure without burning out. “It is always more cost effective to grow talent that has had time to develop experience than to recruit new talent that has to be developed,” adds Buscaron. “Making space for learning and experimentation when inventing new products and new businesses as well as removing blockers and constraints is key to retaining talented individuals performing at their most optimal.”
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