In our earlier interview with Afshana Rahman Diya, CMO at Startise, we uncovered a refreshingly pragmatic approach to marketing and growth. While many tech companies chase growth at all costs, Startise has built an approach that has helped the company attract millions of users while prioritizing profitability from day one.
This piece extracts the most valuable growth and marketing insights from that conversation and structures them into mental models you can apply immediately. These aren’t theoretical concepts, they’re battle-tested strategies that helped Startise go from zero to multi-million users.
The Profit-First Growth Engine
The conventional wisdom says growth comes first, profitability later. Startise flips this model entirely. Ms. Afshana says: “I don’t believe in burning cash upfront. Instead, I focus on making the business profitable first and then reinvesting in growth.”
This approach creates a self-reinforcing cycle where each marketing initiative must justify itself through returns, not just vanity metrics.
How it works in practice:
- Set profitability as a prerequisite for scaling marketing spend
- Reinvest proven profits into new acquisition channels
- Maintain growth that’s sustainable independently of external funding
When competitors are burning cash to acquire users at unsustainable rates, your profit-first approach creates resilience. While they’re scrambling for their next funding round during market downturns, you’re operating from a position of strength.
This approach works particularly well for products with relatively low customer acquisition costs and short sales cycles. It may require modification for deep tech or enterprise products with inherently longer paths to profitability.
It is important to understand here that everything is contextual. There are businesses that can’t focus on profitability out of the gate. For them, this idea doesn’t apply. But for most businesses, it only makes sense to prioritize long term sustainability and find ways to lengthen runway through ideas like ramen profitability.
The Problem-Solution Hierarchy (PSH) Framework
Successful marketing begins with product fundamentals. Ms. Afshana articulates this clearly: “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 creates a hierarchy of priorities that guides marketing decisions:
- Problem validation (Is this a real pain point?)
- Solution validation (Does our product actually solve it?)
- Education (Can users understand how to apply our solution?)
- Amplification (Only then focus on reach and awareness)
Most marketing failures occur when companies invert this hierarchy, trying to amplify solutions to problems that aren’t substantial enough to drive adoption.
The PSH in action:
- Before creating marketing campaigns, confirm you’ve nailed the first three layers
- For early-stage products, focus marketing efforts on clarifying the problem and solution
- Use educational content as both marketing and validation simultaneously
When growth slows, most teams immediately focus on amplification tactics, such as more ads, more content, more channels. Instead, revisit the foundation of the hierarchy. Often, the problem is at the problem-solution level, not the marketing execution level.
The Stage-Adaptive Marketing Matrix
Marketing strategies must evolve with scale. As Ms. Afshana puts it: “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. What got us from 100K to 1 million wasn’t enough for 6 million. We had to constantly evolve, adapt, and optimize everything.”
This isn’t just about doing “more marketing”, it’s about fundamentally shifting priorities at each inflection point.
The practical framework:
| Stage | Primary Focus | Key Marketing Tactics | Metrics to Watch |
| 0-10K Users | Problem-Solution Fit | Content that educates UX simplificationCommunity building | RetentioUser feedback qualityWord-of-mouth % |
| 10K-100K Users | Channel Optimization | Freemium model refinementStrategic partnershipsLocalization | Channel CACFree-to-paid conversionReferral rates |
| 100K-1M Users | Community Leverage | “After 100,000 users, one key approach is leveraging your existing users—making them advocates for your brand.” Thought leadershipPlatform integration | NPSUser-generated contentPlatform-driven growth |
| 1M+ Users | Retention & Monetization | “After reaching a certain number of users, retention became our biggest priority.”Value demonstration Feature expansion | ChurnLTVPremium conversion % |
Most companies either stick with early-stage tactics too long or prematurely adopt late-stage tactics before building the necessary foundation.
Honestly assess which stage your product is in, regardless of how long you’ve been in business. A 5-year-old product might still need early-stage tactics if it hasn’t achieved product-market fit.
The Complementary Growth Strategy
While many startups position themselves as disruptors, Ms. Afshana suggests a counter-intuitive approach: “First, make your product complementary to the platform instead of competing with it, so that as the platform gains more users, your product will grow.”
This approach creates built-in distribution by leveraging existing ecosystems rather than fighting against them. Startise did this within the WordPress ecosystem, but the principle applies across platforms.
Implementation steps:
- Identify platforms where your target users already gather
- Create value that enhances (doesn’t replace) the platform experience
- Align your growth with the platform’s growth trajectory
- Eventually, expand your surface area within that ecosystem
When evaluating where to focus marketing efforts, use this simple matrix:
The key is finding the balance between complementarity and differentiation. Be complementary enough to benefit from the platform’s growth while differentiated enough to capture unique value.
The Conversion-Through-Education Model
In technical or complex product categories, traditional marketing often fails because prospects don’t understand how to use the product or why it matters. Afshana solved this with an education-centric approach: “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 isn’t just about creating educational content, it’s about reconceptualizing the entire marketing funnel around education.
The education-based conversion path:
- Awareness: Content that addresses problems without technical jargon
- Interest: Demonstrations of simplified solutions (visual over technical)
- Desire: Success stories from similar users (not power users)
- Action: Frictionless onboarding with continued education
When you make education central to marketing, you’re not just acquiring users, you’re creating capable users who derive real value and therefore stick around.
This principle can be applied beyond marketing to product development itself: “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.”
Endnote
The beauty of these stratgies is their adaptability across contexts. Whether you’re marketing SaaS, physical products, or services, the fundamental dynamics of solving real problems, building for appropriate stages, and creating sustainable growth engines remain consistent.