31 Ways to Grow your Startup Fast in 2025

To grow a startup, focus on one narrow group of customers, make sure the ones you win keep paying, then test one acquisition channel at a time, measure what each new customer costs and how quickly that cost pays back, and put more money into the channels that work. Which channels to test depends on your stage: cheap, founder-led tactics before $1M in annual recurring revenue (ARR), inbound content and partners from $1M to $3M, paid ads from about $3M, and slower, brand-building moats after $5M.

Below are the five steps, then 31 growth tactics sorted into those four revenue stages, each linked to a full guide.

Key Takeaways

The top quarter of bootstrapped SaaS companies reach $1M ARR in 2 years and the median takes more than 3, according to ChartMogul’s 2024 billing data on more than 2,500 SaaS businesses.
Median marketing spend is 8% of ARR at private B2B SaaS companies, and a typical company with $3M to $5M in ARR spends 8% on marketing and 12% on selling, in SaaS Capital’s 2026 survey of more than 1,000 companies.
83% of bootstrapped companies were profitable or within two percentage points of breakeven, against 52% of equity-backed ones, even though equity-backed companies spent twice as much on marketing as a share of ARR (SaaS Capital, 2026).
Only 13% of the companies in ChartMogul’s 2025 go-to-market data had reached $10M ARR after 10 years.
74% of technology buyers used reviews to inform a purchase and 83% shortlisted three or fewer products, in TrustRadius’s 2026 survey of 1,862 technology buyers.

How to Grow a Startup in 5 Steps

Pick a niche you can name. Choose one type of customer with one urgent problem, narrow enough that you could list the companies by name. A small market you can reach beats a big one you can’t.
Keep the customers you win. Before you spend on growth, check that early customers stay and pay. Pouring new customers into a product people cancel only makes churn bigger.
Test one channel at a time. Pick a channel that fits your stage from the tactics below, give it a fixed budget and a few weeks, and keep everything else steady so you can tell what worked.
Measure CAC and payback. Work out what each new customer cost (customer acquisition cost, or CAC) and how many months of gross profit it takes to earn that back. A channel that pays back fast is one you can afford to scale.
Scale what works, then add the next channel. Move budget into the channel that pays back, fund it from revenue where you can, and go back to step 3 with the next one.

How to grow a startup in five steps: pick a niche, keep the customers you win, test one channel, measure payback, scale it, then test the next channel — The five steps as a loop: test one channel, measure payback, scale it, then test the next. Source: Founderpath, from the five steps in this guide

Expect most tests to fail, even later on. Jason Pearsall, founder and CEO of the golf course software company Club Caddie, told Nathan Latka that his team goes to trade shows, calls every golf course in the country, buys Google search ads and invests in review sites such as Capterra and G2, and that only a few channels work at any one time:

To grow a SaaS company, each of these are one channel. And you need to have dozens of channels. And at any point, only a couple of those channels are going to be successful. And you just got to continue to try new ones to add that couple to become more and more.
Jason Pearsall, Founder and CEO, Club Caddie ($9M revenue). Watch at 19:27

How much to spend: SaaS Capital’s 2026 survey of more than 1,000 private B2B SaaS companies puts median marketing spend at 8% of ARR and selling costs at 15%. Equity-backed companies spent 100% more on marketing than bootstrapped ones, yet 83% of bootstrapped companies were profitable or within two percentage points of breakeven, against 52% of equity-backed companies. Growing from revenue is slower to start, but it doesn’t depend on the next funding round.

Which Growth Tactics Fit Your Stage

Your revenue decides which tactics you can afford and who runs them. Under $1M ARR the founder is the growth team, so the best tactics cost time rather than money and show results within weeks. From $1M to $3M, inbound channels such as content, SEO and free tools are still cheap but take months to compound. From about $3M you can pay for speed with ads, and after $5M the slow, expensive plays (events, a podcast, a book, resellers) build a brand that competitors can’t copy quickly.

Growth tactics by cost and speed: stage 1 tactics are cheap and fast, stage 2 cheap but slow, stage 3 expensive but fast, stage 4 expensive and slow — Where each stage’s tactics sit on cost and speed. Source: Founderpath, from the four stages in this guide

Stage	ARR	Main goal	Usually owned by	Start with
1	Under $1M	Prove customers will pay and stay	Founder or CEO	Cold outreach, webinars, Product Hunt, referrals
2	$1M to $3M	Inbound and partner channels that repeat	Head of content or partnerships	Free tools, blog content, compare pages, co-marketing
3	$3M to $5M	Paid growth that pays back	Head of paid or growth	Retargeting, lookalike and LinkedIn ads, acquisitions
4	$5M+	Moats competitors can’t copy fast	CEO, CMO or brand lead	Marketplaces, review sites, events, podcast, book

The four growth stages in this guide. Source: Founderpath

Treat the stages as defaults, not rules, and set your expectations by the data. In ChartMogul’s 2024 report on more than 2,500 SaaS businesses, the top quarter of bootstrapped companies reached $1M ARR in 2 years, while the median bootstrapped company took more than 3 years. Most never get far past that: ChartMogul’s 2025 go-to-market report found that only 13% of companies had reached $10M ARR after 10 years.

Stage 1: Under $1M ARR, Founder-Led Tactics

Under $1M, you need tactics that are cheap, quick to run and close to cash, because the founder runs them between sales calls. For ways to pay for growth before revenue covers it, see our guide to startup funding options.

Virality and referrals: build sharing into the product, such as invites, shared dashboards or a referral reward, so each customer brings in the next.
Webinars: host short sessions on one narrow problem your buyers have and answer questions live. A solo founder can sell directly in the Q&A.
Powered-by badges: if customers show your product to their own users (forms, booking pages, widgets), add a small branded link that sends viewers to you.
Product Hunt launch: launch, learn from the comments, and relaunch after big releases.
Cold outreach: send short, personal messages to a hand-picked list, such as a quick Loom video instead of a template.
Influencer marketing: partner with small creators your niche already trusts rather than big names.
Account-based marketing (ABM): pick about 20 dream customers and write the outreach for each one. It doesn’t scale yet, and that’s fine.
Free reports: publish data your buyers want, collect emails and follow up with a demo.

Stage 2: $1M to $3M ARR, Inbound and Partners

Past $1M, the founder can’t be every channel. The goal is systems that bring leads in without you: content that ranks, tools people bookmark and partners who send customers.

Free tools: calculators, audits or templates that solve one small problem for your buyer and give them a reason to come back.
Newsletter: turn readers and users into subscribers and send on a fixed schedule. Consistency is what compounds.
Partner co-marketing: run joint webinars, case studies and integrations with tools your customers already use.
Affiliate marketing: pay a recurring commission to people who already reach your buyers.
Blog content: write for the mid-funnel questions buyers search before they choose, such as “best tools for” your category.
Compare pages: build honest “X vs Y” and alternatives pages for buyers who are already comparing.
Facebook groups: build a group around the problem you solve and turn active members into advocates.
Glossaries and directories: use programmatic SEO to publish one page per term, integration or use case from structured data, so each page answers one search.
Founder brand: post what you learn, including the numbers and the mistakes. Buyers trust a person before a logo.

Partnerships can work earlier than this. David Chevalier, co-founder and CEO of the CRM data tool Surfe, said its first 100 customers all came from partnerships with CRMs such as HubSpot and Pipedrive, while the company was still bootstrapped. His team looked at what each partner’s pricing grows on (HubSpot charges by the number of users) and pitched Surfe as a way to speed up HubSpot’s own upsells. Surfe reached its first $1 million in about a year and a half with partnerships alone and no sales team (watch at 4:24), and had a revenue run rate of about $15M in June 2026 (per GetLatka).

Watch the full interview with David Chevalier, with transcript.

Stage 3: $3M to $5M ARR, Paid Acquisition

With a team and steady revenue, you can test paid channels. Spend only where you can track which ad brought which customer and how fast that customer paid back. For a budget benchmark, SaaS Capital’s 2026 survey found that a typical B2B SaaS company with $3M to $5M in ARR spends 8% of ARR on marketing and 12% on selling, at the median. At $4M of ARR, 8% is about $320,000 a year for all of marketing, not only ads (our arithmetic).

Retargeting: show ads to warm visitors, such as trial sign-ups who didn’t convert and people who viewed your pricing or demo page.
Lookalike audiences: upload a list of your best customers so ad platforms can find people like them.
LinkedIn ads: target by job title and company, and test messages tied to a business result rather than features.
TikTok and Snap ads: short, story-led video can work for B2B too. Test it with the people who already make your short-form content.
Sponsorships: sponsor newsletters, podcasts, events or creators whose audience matches your buyers.
Acquisitions: buy a small tool, plugin or Chrome extension that adds a feature or customers faster than building it yourself.

Stage 4: $5M+ ARR, Moats

At scale, growth is about durability. These plays are slow and expensive, but they build trust and a brand that a competitor can’t copy in a quarter. Reviews are one place it pays off: in TrustRadius’s 2026 survey of 1,862 technology buyers, 74% used reviews to inform a purchase and 83% shortlisted three or fewer products. TrustRadius sells review products, so weigh that, but it shows how early the short list is decided.

Value-added resellers: sign partners who resell your product into industries or regions you don’t serve yet.
App marketplaces: list in the marketplaces your customers already shop in, such as Salesforce AppExchange, HubSpot and Zapier.
Magazine: print or digital, a publication with real customer stories builds trust with a buying committee.
Review sites: ask happy customers for reviews on G2, Capterra and TrustRadius, and answer the critical ones.
Book: a book is a credibility asset that opens doors and names your category.
Podcast: interviews build relationships with the guests you want as customers and partners, and the episodes keep getting found.
Live events: host summits, user conferences or dinners. At this stage, relationships beat reach.
Organic SEO: keep publishing and updating content so search traffic keeps compounding.

Growth Hacks vs a Growth Strategy

A growth hack is a cheap, fast experiment aimed at one growth metric, such as a referral reward, a launch or a new landing page. Sean Ellis popularized the term in 2010, writing that startups ready to scale should hire or appoint a growth hacker instead of a traditional VP of marketing:

A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth.
Sean Ellis, Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup, July 26, 2010

A hack only becomes a strategy when it repeats. The 31 tactics above are where most hacks come from, and the five steps decide which one you run next and when to stop. Once a tactic works more than once, write it down so someone else can run it: our SaaS growth playbooks library has 69 guides grouped by channel.

How to Tell Whether a Tactic Is Working

Judge each channel on three numbers, tracked separately for each channel:

CAC by channel: sales and marketing spend on that channel divided by the customers it brought in (CAC calculator).
Payback: the months of gross profit a new customer needs to repay its CAC (payback period calculator).
Retention of the customers it brought: a channel whose customers cancel within three months costs more than it looks.

Most teams can’t split these numbers by channel. At a September 2024 SaaSOpen talk, Kyle Vamvouris, CEO of Vouris, asked the audience whether they knew if their team’s booked meetings came from a cold call, a cold email or LinkedIn, and about one person raised a hand:

It’s important that you understand which channel is driving the results… So you need to figure that out for yourself. If you’re not tracking, you’ll never know.
Kyle Vamvouris, CEO, Vouris ($1M revenue). Watch at 14:06

For the definitions and benchmarks behind these numbers, see our guide to SaaS KPIs.

Paying for Growth Without Selling Equity

Once a channel pays back reliably, the limit is usually cash to run more of it. Revenue-based lenders look at the same numbers you track: recurring revenue, retention and margins.

Founderpath provides non-dilutive capital for B2B SaaS companies with at least $10K MRR. There’s no equity, no warrants, no board seats and no personal guarantees. Connect your billing, banking and accounting data, and most founders see funds within 24-48 hours.

Check what you qualify for. It takes less than 5 minutes.

How to Grow a Startup: FAQ

What is the fastest way to grow a startup?

Focus on one narrow group of customers, keep the customers you win, and put your effort into one acquisition channel that fits your stage until it pays back. Under $1M in ARR that usually means founder-led tactics such as cold outreach, webinars and launches, which cost time rather than money.

What are the stages of startup growth?

There is no single standard list. This guide uses four revenue stages for software companies: under $1M ARR (prove customers pay and stay), $1M to $3M (build inbound and partner channels that repeat), $3M to $5M (add paid acquisition) and over $5M (build moats such as marketplaces, events and a brand).

Is it true that 90% of startups fail?

Not according to official data. Of the U.S. private-sector establishments that opened in the year to March 2015, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 79.6% still operating after one year, 50.2% after five years and 34.7% after ten. That is about two in three closing within ten years, not nine in ten, and it covers all new business locations, not only venture-backed startups.

What growth strategies are best for startups?

The ones that fit your stage. Early on, founder-led tactics such as cold outreach, webinars, referrals and a Product Hunt launch are cheap and quick. From about $1M ARR, content, SEO, free tools and partners start to compound. Paid ads usually make sense once you can measure customer acquisition cost and payback for each channel.

What is a growth hack?

A growth hack is a cheap, fast experiment aimed at one growth metric, such as a referral reward, a launch or a new landing page. Sean Ellis popularized the term growth hacker in a 2010 post, describing a person whose true north is growth. A hack becomes a strategy only once it works repeatedly and you know what it costs.

How long does it take a startup to reach $1M in ARR?

In ChartMogul’s 2024 report on more than 2,500 SaaS businesses, the top quarter of bootstrapped companies reached $1M ARR in 2 years and the median bootstrapped company took more than 3 years. The median venture-backed company got there in under 3 years.

How much should a startup spend on marketing?

SaaS Capital’s 2026 survey of more than 1,000 private B2B SaaS companies found a median of 8% of ARR spent on marketing and 15% on selling. Bootstrapped companies spend less: equity-backed companies spent 100% more on marketing, while 83% of bootstrapped companies were profitable or within two percentage points of breakeven.