When startup leaders discuss growth, they often default to high-burn strategies and hyper-scaling at all costs. It's refreshing, then, when a CMO who's actually led a product to millions of users offers a different perspective.
Afshana Rahman Diya, CMO at Startise, doesn't believe in burning cash upfront. Instead, she's built a playbook around profitability-first growth, solving real user problems, and building everything—from product features to team structure—with scalability in mind. It's a pragmatic framework that focuses on fundamentals: user-centricity, community engagement, and consistent execution. This makes her lessons applicable not just to SaaS companies, but to practitioners across various domains.
We recently featured a fascinating interview with Ms. Diya (read the full interview here). In this piece, we extract some of the key strategies from the interview that guided Startise from early-stage development to multi-million user scale, organized into actionable tactics you can apply to your own business.
Too many startups follow the "grow at all costs" playbook, burning through capital with the hope that profitability will somehow materialize later. Ms. Diya suggests companies take the opposite approach: "I don’t believe in burning cash upfront,” she tells us in the interview. “Instead, I focus on making the business profitable first and then reinvesting in growth".
One can discount this simply as conservative thinking but it is not. It's strategic. By achieving profitability early, Startise created a self-sustaining growth engine that didn't depend on continuous external funding.
The path to finding profitability is not that hard as it is made out to be. Start with a viable business model rather than prioritizing user acquisition metrics alone. Stay lean. Test pricing models early to ensure unit economics work before scaling. Use profits for subsequent growth initiatives.
While this approach requires more patience initially, it creates significantly more resilience and greater chance of building a successful business. When market conditions changed, Startise wasn't scrambling for the next funding round—they were making their own decisions based on customer needs and business fundamentals.
At the core of Startise's success is an obsessive focus on solving real user problems. As Ms. Diya puts it: "Product comes first. You have to figure out what works for your users, and that's your most important marketing task at the beginning. First and foremost, focus on solving a real problem. Start small and then scale smart."
This isn't just about having a good product, it's about a development philosophy where marketing, product, and user needs form an integrated system.
But how can you build a framework to guide your decisions so they remain user centric? There are many ways to do that. We draw these strategies from the interview that can be turned into a tentative framework:
Problem Identification: Start with genuine user pain points rather than feature ideas
Community Engagement Loop: Actively engaging with the target community provides valuable feedback and helps in identifying opportunities for improvement. "Community engagement was a big approach we tried from the very start. It helped us understand where we stood and where we should go".
Complementary Strategy: Another shortcut can be building products that complement the platform that you are building on. Instead of competing, creating products that enhance popular platforms can drive growth as the platform expands. "Make your product complementary to the platform instead of competing with it, so that as the platform gains more users, your product will grow".
Education and Usability Focus: Creating helpful resources and ensuring an intuitive user experience are vital for attracting and retaining users. "For Essential Addons and our other products, content marketing was our biggest driver. We deeply understood our users as most were non-technical people looking for an easy way to build websites with drag-and-drop tools. So, instead of just promoting features, we focused on education and usability". "One of our biggest growth levers was simplifying the user experience. Everything from the UI to onboarding was designed to be intuitive for users who don’t code".
This approach works particularly well for products in established ecosystems (like Startise in the WordPress space) where you can leverage existing platforms rather than building everything from scratch.
One of Ms. Diya's most valuable insights is recognizing that growth strategies must evolve as your user base expands: "The challenges at different stages of growth are completely different. What works when you have 1,000 users won't be enough when you hit 100,000 and definitely not at a million."
Similarly, "What got us from 100K to 1 million wasn't enough for 6 million. We had to constantly evolve, adapt, and optimize everything - from product to people to processes."
Rather than seeking a single growth strategy, successful companies need a framework for adapting tactics to their current stage.
For instance, when you are going from 0-10,000, finding problem-solution fit should be your primary focus, which can be achieved through, among other things, simplifying UX, content marketing, and community building. And you should track user retention and problem resolution as success metrics at this stage.
These tactics and strategies change as you move up the growth ladder. For a company going from 10k-100k, primary focus should be on scaling channels. Key tactics can be around introducing clever pricing models such as freemium model, building strategic partnerships, and localization. Success metrics at this stage are usually CAC/LTV and conversion rates.
And then when a company goes from 100k-1M, leveraging the community can be an effective strategy. Ms. Diya recommends: "After 100,000 users, one key approach is leveraging your existing users—making them advocates for your brand." Building thought leadership is another key tactic one can use at this stage. Referral metrics, word-of-mouth acquisition are some of the key metrics one should pay attention to at this stage.
Finally, when you are going beyond 1M, retention and delivering additional value become the key focus. "After reaching a certain number of users, retention became our biggest priority... We focused on showing real value to free users, nudging them to upgrade", explains Ms. Diya. This is the stage where you pay special attention to metrics like churn rate and upgrade rates.
It is critical that we understand where we are in our growth journey and identify tactics that can make the most difference in each of these stages. The most common mistake is trying to apply late-stage tactics too early, or failing to evolve beyond early-stage tactics as you grow. The key is matching your approach to your current reality.
Sustainable growth requires building both teams and processes that can scale: Consider future growth when designing products, teams, and operational processes. Ms. Diya recognizes this. "Another key is building everything – from product to team – in a scalable way", she notes. "When designing your daily processes, if I understand what you mean, you have to design them with sustainability in mind... The important thing is designing everything with long-term sustainability in mind".
This principle informed how Startise approached everything from hiring to product development.
But how do you build scalable teams and processes?
We scanned our interview with Ms. Diya to figure out a blueprint that anyone can use as a guide to build scalable teams and processes:
Hiring for learnability over experience. In order to scale an organization, you need people who can scale themselves. The only way to scale humans is through learning. Thus what to do becomes self-evident: when hiring, prioritize individuals who are willing to learn the specifics of marketing. "What we did was hire smart, tech-savvy people and train them to learn the technical back end and understand our culture and how we wanted to promote our product globally. Most of our team members are trained in-house. We train them from scratch". The willingness to learn is the most important meta skill. If someone has the willingness to learn, they can overcome every other limitation.
Consistency as Competitive Advantage: Prioritize consistency. Maintaining consistency in development, updates, and reliability is crucial for long-term success. "At scale, consistency is everything, I keep saying it all the time. Releasing new features, updating products, fixing bugs, and maintaining reliability—these are what separate products that last from those that fade out."
Cross-Functional Collaboration: As the team and product offerings grow, effective collaboration between marketing, product, design, support, and development teams becomes essential for efficient execution and sustained growth. "Collaboration between product, design, support, and other teams needs to be smooth... Without smooth collaboration, we couldn't have accompanied this growth." This highlights the importance of breaking down silos within the organization.
Culture of Adaptability: Cultivating a culture that encourages learning, adaptability, and a willingness to embrace change is crucial for navigating the dynamic landscape of business and tech. "From the very start at WPDeveloper, we tried to build a culture that was a bit different from other tech companies in Bangladesh. Cultural fit and adaptability were the main things we focused on when hiring new team members..." Also, "Since this is a very fast-paced company, and the digital landscape is changing every day, people who are interested in a dynamic environment and open to continuous learning are a better fit for our setup."
Humans are wired to think in the moment. When solving a problem, we are likely focused on finding a quick fix. But when you are building an organization, you need to find ways to overcome this tendency.
Instead, when evaluating potential hires, processes, or features, the key question shouldn't be "Does this work now?" but rather "Will this still work when we're 10x our current size?"
Throughout Ms. Diya's approach is a consistent theme of balancing immediate needs with sustainable growth. When planning, you should consider both immediate gains and the overall health and longevity of the business. "Sustainability in growth means finding the balance between scaling fast and scaling smart,” she explains. “It's not just about short-term wins but ensuring that every initiative builds towards long-term impact".
This balancing act appears in multiple dimensions of the business.
Product Design: Technical elegance vs. user accessibility. A crucial insight, especially in the WordPress ecosystem, is to design products that are intuitive and easy to use for the target audience, who may not be developers. "A very common mistake is designing a product from a developer's perspective instead of making it accessible for anyone to use. This applies to everything from structure to user experience." This user-centric design philosophy directly impacts adoption and growth.
Marketing Channel: Experimentation vs. optimization. "At the start, we experimented with multiple channels on a smaller scale, carefully testing what worked instead of going all in blindly." She also emphasizes, "You have to be willing to change all the time because the world is changing all the time. If you don’t adapt to the changes in the market, it can create existential risks for you as a company." This underscores the need for a dynamic and learning-oriented approach to growth.
Business Model: Free acquisition vs. premium conversion. Offering a free version of the product can be an effective strategy to attract users and create an entry point for upselling to premium features. "One of the strategies I would particularly mention is the freemium business model. In the software ecosystem, anyone should deliver a free version that creates an entry point for users and provides upgrades for advanced features. That makes it easier to penetrate the market."
Growth: Acquisition vs. retention. Retention is not just about bug fixes; it's about continuously providing value through new features, consistent support, and listening to user feedback. "For retention, you have to provide a good product so people stay and don't look for other alternatives. At the same time, it depends not just on features, but on consistency in support, bringing new features, and listening to users." This long-term focus on user satisfaction is key to sustainable growth.
This balanced approach is particularly valuable in competitive markets where both short-term traction and long-term sustainability are essential. It's less applicable for moonshot products or in winner-take-all markets where speed might trump all other considerations.
What makes Ms. Diya's insights particularly valuable is that they've been validated through actual results—growing to millions of users without relying on the typical high-burn startup playbook.
The key to applying these frameworks in your own context is recognizing which stage of growth you're in and adapting the appropriate elements accordingly. A pre-product startup should focus intensely on the user-centric development framework, while a company with product-market fit might prioritize the stage-appropriate growth tactics.
The common thread through all of the insights in this article: sustainable growth comes from solving real problems, building everything with scale in mind, and prioritizing profitability and user value over vanity metrics or growth at all costs.
As Ms. Diya puts it: "You have to be willing to change all the time because the world is changing all the time. If you don't adapt to the changes in the market, it can create existential risks for you as a company."
That adaptability, coupled with a foundation of solid business fundamentals, is the real secret to building products that not only grow—but last.
