Grow with your early customers as they scale - serve startups first then expand upmarket as they become enterprises
Target fast-growing startups as initial customers and build your product to scale alongside them. As your early customers grow from small startups to large companies, their expanding needs pull your product upmarket naturally. This creates deep customer relationships, organic expansion revenue, and real-world enterprise requirements discovered through actual use rather than sales-driven feature requests.
When to use
When building infrastructure or platform products where customers' needs grow over time
Don't do this
Starting by targeting enterprise customers who require complex sales cycles and feature sets you haven't validated
1 Founder Who Did This
Started by serving YC startups with a simple payments API. As customers like Lyft, Shopify, and Slack grew into major companies, Stripe's infrastructure scaled with them, naturally pulling the company upmarket