Web3 Startup Accelerator Using The Cyclic Growth Framework
Secret sauce for web3 business strategy, product planning, and community development.
The Cyclic Growth Framework solves the struggle and waste that startups experience to achieve ‘product market fit’.
The Cyclic Growth Framework cycles through three phases of growth to build the confident towards genuine market traction and optimal budgeting across product development, strategic marketing, and customer experience.
Incubate We start 'small' by defining the business.
Accelerate We can then choose the fastest route to build real-world market traction.
Scale Once 'product market fit' is achieved, we can scale.
The Cyclic Growth Model
Three pillars of startup growth are: Product, Marketing, and Customer Experience.
Get the mix wrong...
...and projects languish or die. Scrambling to achieve ‘product-market-fit’ by hook or by crook, without achieving authentic problem-solution-fit, wastes precious time and scarce resources.
Get the mix right...
...and you can progress confidently through the traditional lean-startup phases of 'problem-solution-fit', to achieve genuine 'product-market-fit', and then to the magical phase of ‘scale’.
How Does The Cyclic Growth Framework Help?
Cyclic Media supports product planning and validation, customer insight, business model refinement, and go-to-market strategy for budget conscious growth experimentation that drives scale.
Led by its founder Gavriel Shaw, our network includes Compliance Advisors, Community Planners, and a range of designers and marketers — who may become valuable resources for your project in time.
Our team can support areas such as:
- Crypto Compliance
- Crypto Marketing
- Product Planning
- Brand Reputation Management
- Customer Journey Mapping
- Revenue Attribution Analytics
- Customer Experience
- Community Development
- Regional Roll-out
The Cyclic Growth Framework includes 3 cycles of focus:
(Based on our upcoming book: The Startup Flywheel.)
Cycle 1 — Modeling
First, we design end-to-end customer engagements via market insight, product alignment, and objectives roadmapping.
No cutting corners. The early stage of analysis is vital to a smooth running growth program.
Customer Insight
What:
Organize the interests and pain-points of your market and their willingness to engage based on your current stage of development.
Why:
Projects fail by assuming too much. Better insights means a lower customer acquisition cost overall and faster time to product-market-fit.
How:
Product Alignment
What:
Develop the core value proposition based on your business model to plan the best acquisition and activation experience for your brand, including the right customer user journey based on the stage of product development, market sophistication, and resource availability.
Why:
We can run ads. We can post on Twitter. We can make lots of noise in the market. But without positioning you against the competitors your customers can choose from, all that noise may fall on deaf ears.
How:
Performance Objectives
What:
Based on current revenue streams we agree sensible KPIs to manage the marketing budget with clear expectations.
Why:
Funding, revenue, performance targets, and marketing budgets need to be in sync so together we achieve long-term commercial viability based on the campaigns we deliver at each stage of growth.
How:
Cycle 2 — Traction
Second, market traction depends on community development, brand engagement, and traffic campaign management. In a nutshell: Content and Distribution.
We work alongside your team, your partners, or our partners — to pinpoint a series of experiences for your target audience — without chasing our tails at the last minute wondering what to do next. It’s as pre-planned as possible, adjusting to conditions as needed.
Community Development
What:
Our global moderation and social amplification team presents your brand professionally with relevant communications, aligned with the agreed market strategy.
Why:
Lean Startup literature reveals that 'problem solution fit' (discovery and validation) is often neglected, leading to a failure to achieve actual 'product market fit'. Authentic Community Development is the bedrock foundation of a successful launch.
How:
Brand Engagement
What:
With Content Marketing & Customer Journey Mapping we build Conversion Funnels: from brand awareness through to engaged platform users.
Why:
Having relevant campaigns based on each stage of the customers journey ensures that we leave no customer acquisition opportunity behind.
How:
Traffic Campaigns
What:
Through paid, organic, or PR channels we build insight while building traffic flow to your web properties for user acquisition.
Why:
Traffic generation is where the rubber meets the road. There are many strategies for traffic generation suitable for different budgets, based on current stage of product development, and market size.
Throwing a press release out into the wild, or running a few paid ads, is not a professional approach to marketing.
Optimizing traffic campaigns requires knowing how they all fit together like a jigsaw puzzle over time to compound the results without wasting budget.
How:
Cycle 3 — Optimization
Third, growth doesn’t come by chance.
We dig into the weeds of growth analytics with enterprise-grade solutions across channels: paid ads, social, PR, word of mouth, referral and affiliate, influencers, partners, SEO, etc.
Growth
What:
Rapid iteration of customer experience throughout the customer journey using product analytics and CRO (conversion rate optimization).
Why:
Until you see the bottom line results of split testing, you never know how much money you're leaving on the table. As soon as you see an uplift based on a split test, you'll become fanatical about testing as much as possible — just like us.
How:
Scale
What:
Traffic acceleration across marketing channels as suits your product lifecycle.
Why:
Now that we have revenue coming in from all the marketing activity, and kinks in the product are being ironed out with new features based on data-driven customer insight, we can ramp up budgets to scale as fast as the market and cashflow can handle.
How:
Risk
What:
Our experienced team helps mitigate business risk including supporting your talent acquisition process as you grow.
Why:
Launch marketing is different to post-MVP marketing. Converting the marketing function into a global marketing team turns a startup into an established brand.
How:
The Cyclic Growth Framework is cyclical, with 3 phases of growth, always returning to the insights and assumptions needed to design new customer experience, as we build new forms of market traction, and scale new areas of the business.
Delivered in 3 steps:
1. Application
First, our team vets all project applications.
Pitching us a promise of mega moon token profits will not get you into our program.
So what will?
Passion. Smarts. A commercially viable idea. Credibility.
We vet projects just like a seed investor might. We want to know that you and your team or business concept has genuine merit for the effort we put in to our side of the deal.
If accepted onto the program and we find mutually beneficial terms, we progress to phase 2.
2. Discovery
Second, together we lay all the cards on the table to get a picture of the current project context.
Marketing Discovery involves pinpointing core brand values (which become the personality of the brand) along with current insights and assumptions about (a) the market, (b) the customer, (c) possible routes to market, and (d) possible phases of growth through incubation, acceleration and scale.
From that discovery, we can build a relevant research and validation program around those insights and assumptions which can then inform a practical marketing plan.
Key Area 1: Understand the Business Direction
- Success Factors
- Strengths, Weaknesses and Opportunities (product, customer experience, marketing)
- Market Threats & Risks
- Key Stakeholders (partners, regulators, customers, investors, journalists)
Key Area 2: Understand the Audience Perspective
- Audience Scenario Mapping
- Brand Narrative (backstory, values, superpowers)
- Routes To Market
Discovery Outcomes
- v1 Marketing Roadmap (which may include initial channel selection, phases of MVP validation, agreement on establishing an early brand presence for grassroots community development,
- v1 answer to: Who must we be and what must we do in the marketplace to attract the right audience & communicate our value (for the brand, commercial viability, and MVP validation) based on resourcing/budget available both now and projected?
How far we get in Discovery partly depends on how much work has already been done in these areas.
However (rather than doing a superficial job), the risk mitigation that comes from exploring assumptions and agreeing strategic next steps for market validation, is the most important outcome here.
3. Incubation
Third, we progress through the various workshops and exercises of the Cyclic Growth Framework.
A 6 to 12 week program (with workshops and homework) to build out your business model for effectively and efficiently moving towards product market fit in the real-world.
The 5 Cyclic Incubator Workshops focus on: Situation, Proposition, Experience, Growth Model, and Delivery.
Here's a peak of the Incubator area that we collaborate on throughout the process:
Results
The result of the Cyclic Incubator is a best practice Go-To Market strategy including real-world data as evidence for the direction of your project to reach what only 20% of startups achieve: Product Market Fit. This includes a clear business roadmap incorporating brand strategy, product R&D priorities that suit customer validation, and a marketing communications plan.
...From there, you become eligible for the Cyclic Accelerator Program where we build market traction to either raise investor funds (Token Sale, NFT Launch, or Private Equity) or achieve customer sales revenue through practical multi-channel marketing.
Grow Your Crypto Brand With The Cyclic Growth Framework, ...managed by our crypto-savvy team of marketers, copywriters, community developers, and designers.
Case Study Highlights
We've had the privilege of working with a broad mix of brands at various stages of their lifecycle.
Case Studies
Meet (or Join) The Team
A globally diversified multi-talented team of advisors, campaign managers and content specialists.
The Team
Cyclic Media, Inc.
Contact us for a discovery call.