How to grow your startup like a chia pet

Sort of.

While the ch-ch-ch-chia requires just a few simple inputs, those being water and seeds, your startup will need a lot more: humans, technology, real estate, capital, IP…and finding the right formula can be tricky, especially in the first year.

There’s a fine line between lean, efficient, and bloated, and this is especially true before a company reaches profitability. As you get your books in order and work through financial projections, it’s important to look at what’s necessary and what isn’t. We can group these necessities in two familiar buckets:

• Fixed costs (the shell of your chia pet)
• Variable costs (the water and seeds)

When it comes to growing your business, two roles are vital to success (insert quote about how having the best product in the world doesn’t matter if no one knows it exists): business development and marketing. Both fall into the variable costs category, and I’ll break them out further by calling business development the seeds, and marketing the water.

Today, what we know as “business development” and “marketing” can vary widely in definition from person to person and company to company. Young startups often blur the line between the two, and when executed correctly, this can be a good avenue to running a leaner…