Management

What Startup Businesses Need at Each Stage of Growth

Young companies pass through three phases of maturity. They need different things in — and from — their tech stacks at each one.

Ryan Petersen

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Ryan has been a magazine and newspaper editor for 21 years, with the last 15 covering a variety of bases for CDW’s family of tech magazines. As Editor in Chief, he works on developing editorial strategy and is always on the lookout for new writing talent and sharing great stories with the IT world. In his spare time, Ryan enjoys spending time with his family, biking and obsessively following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs baseball.

This time of year often evokes a spirit of renewed vitality. The lazy days of summer are over, vacation season has passed, the kids are back in school (for real this time) and now begins the sprint to the end of the year. How much can we achieve before we’re ushering in 2022?

Of course, business leaders often possess that sense of urgency year-round — none more so than those within startup companies, who live each day on the razor’s edge knowing that the choices they make can mean the difference between failure and unimaginable success.

Building the Stages of Success

That’s why startup leaders rarely pass up a chance to give their businesses every advantage possible. Deploying the right technology solutions at the right time is just such an advantage, and it’s one that’s often overlooked.

As we point out in our cover story, startup businesses tend to need different things in their technology stacks, and from them, in each phase of their maturity.

For example, the medical training platform company Immertec, like many emerging-stage startups, needed help building out its products, so we sourced the high-end microphones, touch-screen monitors, 4K cameras and specialized computers that the company’s technology works with. As they move into the growth stage, startups’ security needs get more complex. Fast-growing collaboration firm Miro found safety in a host of cloud-based security solutions from Okta and SentinelOne.

The most mature startups are scaling their businesses, so they often need help regulating their processes. ShipBob, a provider of e-commerce fulfillment services, achieved that when it started equipping its fulfillment centers around the country with the right standard set of hardware devices and infrastructure equipment.

In business, growth is always both the goal and the challenge. Companies find that growth comes a little faster — and that the hurdles are more easily cleared — when they start with the right tech stack from the beginning.

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