PRE-SEED · SEED · SERIES A-D · M&A
Growth that is designed, not improvised
Sheyconomics builds go-to-market and growth plans that match the stage a company is actually at, not the one it wishes it were at. The right motion at seed rarely survives unchanged into Series B, and mistaking one for the other is an expensive way to learn the difference.
Where this matters, by stage
Pre-seed & seed
Finding the first repeatable channel before burning runway testing five at once.
Series A & B
Proving a growth engine scales past the founder’s own network and early relationships.
Series C, D & beyond
Diversifying channel mix and sales motion before a single concentrated dependency becomes a board-level risk.
M&A situations
Reconciling two go-to-market motions and customer bases into one growth plan that investors and acquirers can underwrite.
FRAMEWORK
The growth diagnostic
Unit economics
Whether CAC-to-LTV holds once discounting and churn are priced in honestly, not on the optimistic case.
Channel concentration
What share of new revenue depends on a single channel, founder relationship or partner.
Retention curve
Whether the curve flattens into a real cohort plateau or keeps decaying past month twelve.
Sales motion fit
Whether the current motion, self-serve, sales-assisted or enterprise, actually matches the deal size being pursued.
EXAMPLE
A Series A company with one channel doing all the work
Context. A vertical SaaS company had grown to Series A almost entirely on founder-led outbound and a handful of referrals, with a marketing team recently hired but no proven second channel.
Analysis. The diagnostic showed strong unit economics on the existing channel but near-total dependence on it, a structural risk for the next round given that outbound capacity does not scale linearly with headcount.
Output. The growth plan prioritized one adjacent channel, partner-sourced pipeline, tested it against the same unit-economics bar as outbound, and only scaled spend once it cleared that bar on its own.
What a mandate covers
Growth diagnostic
An honest read on unit economics, channel concentration and retention before recommending anything.
Channel and motion design
A prioritized plan for the next channel or sales motion, sized to the stage and the budget actually available.
Investor-ready narrative
The growth story translated into the language a board, an investor or an acquirer will actually underwrite.
The bottom line
Growth plans fail more often from being copied than from being wrong. A motion that worked at a different company, at a different stage, rarely transfers cleanly. The diagnostic exists to find out what is actually true here before recommending what worked somewhere else.
The lesson. Fix the concentration risk in the current channel before adding a new one. A second unproven channel does not offset dependence on the first, it just adds a second thing that can break.
