How to build a B2C growth strategy from scratch

Most B2C startups don't have a growth strategy. They have a collection of marketing activities—some paid ads here, a bit of content there, maybe an email sequence somebody set up six months ago. Everyone is busy, but nobody can clearly articulate how it all connects to the business goals.

This isn't a criticism. When you're moving fast and resource-constrained, it's natural to jump straight to tactics. But at some point—usually around Series A, or when you've hit a growth plateau—the lack of a coherent strategy starts to hurt.

Here's a practical framework for building one.

Start with the business, not the marketing

The most common mistake is starting with channels. "We should do more paid social" or "we need a content strategy" or "let's try TikTok." These might all be good ideas, but they're answers to a question you haven't asked yet.

The right starting point is the business objective. What does success look like in 12 months? This is usually some combination of:

• Revenue or GMV target — the top-line number the business needs to hit
• Customer growth — how many new customers, and at what acquisition cost
• Unit economics — LTV:CAC ratio, payback period, contribution margin
• Market expansion — new geographies, segments, or verticals

Get specific. "Grow revenue" is not a strategy input. "Grow from £2M to £5M ARR with a blended CAC under £40 and a 12-month payback" gives you something to work backwards from.

Understand your customer deeply

Before you decide how to reach people, you need to understand who they are and why they buy. This sounds obvious, but most startups skip past it because they think they already know.

The questions that matter:

• What problem does your product solve, in the customer's words (not yours)?
• What was the trigger that made them look for a solution?
• What alternatives did they consider?
• What nearly stopped them from signing up?
• What made them stay (or leave)?

Talk to your customers. Not a survey—actual conversations. Ten good interviews will teach you more than a thousand NPS responses. This isn't just a brand exercise; it directly informs your channel strategy, messaging, and creative.

Map the funnel and find the bottleneck

Every B2C business has a funnel, even if it's never been formally mapped. Awareness → Consideration → Signup → Activation → Retention → Revenue. The specific steps vary, but the principle is the same.

The question is: where's the bottleneck?

If you have a 40% activation rate but only 500 signups a month, your problem is top-of-funnel. If you have 10,000 signups but only 8% activate, your problem is onboarding. If people activate but churn after 3 months, your problem is retention.

This matters because it determines where your growth strategy should focus. Pouring money into acquisition when your activation is broken is just filling a leaky bucket faster.

Choose your channels deliberately

With your goals set, customer understood, and bottleneck identified, you can now choose channels with purpose rather than instinct.

For each potential channel, ask:

• Is our audience there? Not theoretically—actually. Can you reach your specific customer segment at a reasonable cost?
• Can we test it quickly? How fast can you get a signal on whether this channel works? Days, weeks, or months?
• Does it compound? Some channels (SEO, content, brand) build over time. Others (paid social, SEM) start and stop with your spend.
• Can we be good at it? Do you have the team, creative, or content to compete in this channel?

Start with two or three channels, max. Depth beats breadth. It's better to be excellent in two channels than mediocre in six.

Set up measurement from day one

You can't iterate without feedback. Before you launch anything, make sure you can answer:

• How many customers did this channel drive?
• What was the cost per acquisition?
• What's the quality of those customers (activation rate, LTV)?

This doesn't need to be perfect. Attribution will never be 100% accurate. But you need enough signal to know what's working and what isn't. Set up conversion tracking, agree on your attribution model (even if it's imperfect), and build a dashboard your team reviews weekly.

Build the team to match the strategy

Your strategy is only as good as your ability to execute it. If your strategy depends on paid social but nobody on your team knows how to run Meta ads, you have a gap.

For each channel in your strategy, be honest about whether you have the capability to execute it well. If not, you have three options: hire, outsource (agency or freelancer), or upskill someone on your existing team. Each has trade-offs depending on your stage, budget, and timeline.

I've written more about this in your first 5 marketing hires.

Iterate relentlessly

A growth strategy is not a static document. It's a system that you run, learn from, and adjust. The best growth teams treat their strategy as a set of hypotheses to test, not a plan to follow blindly.

Set a cadence: weekly channel reviews, monthly strategy check-ins, quarterly planning. Each cycle, ask: What did we learn? What's working? What should we stop? What should we try next?

The companies that win at growth aren't the ones with the best initial strategy. They're the ones that iterate fastest.

Putting it all together

A good B2C growth strategy fits on one page:

1. Business objective: Where are we going and by when?
2. Customer insight: Who are we targeting and why do they buy?
3. Bottleneck: What's the biggest constraint on growth right now?
4. Channel plan: Which 2-3 channels will we invest in, and why?
5. Metrics: How will we know it's working?
6. Team: Who is executing, and do we have the right capabilities?

If you can answer these six questions clearly, you have a growth strategy. Everything else is execution—which is where the real work begins.