Let’s Not Get Ahead Of Ourselves

Summary

If you use a learn and discovery approach to your start-up right from the beginning you stand a better chance of success. Learn who your customers are and discover if there is a market for your product.

Let’s Not Get Ahead Of Ourselves

One of the reasons start-ups fail is they try to run before they can walk. Yes, it’s great to have aspirations, but don’t go worrying ahead about things in your business’s future before you’ve properly dealt with today. This means slowing down your early process and building a solid base. What’s your base? Yourcustomer of course. Spend time on this first before you start product development and you have the seeds you need to grow your business.

Learn and discover

So, take a step back and prepare to do some learning and discovering. This is a totally different approach to the product development approach and it requires you to understand who your initial customers will be and what market they are in. We say ‘initial customers’ because there will be a difference between your early customers and the ones who follow. At this point you are not attempting to sell or market your product. As we mentioned before, doing these things before you understand your customers is the road to disaster. You must establish that a market and customers actually exist for your product first. It might sound simple and obvious, but this is not how start-ups traditionally behave. Understand your customers and who they are. Your early customers are not your mainstream customers, and they will behave differently and require a different approach when it comes to marketing and sales strategies. If you get this far, fantastic, but for now, concentrate on those early customers and if they even exist. You can run with the mainstream later.

Build it in early

Learning about your customers has to be integrated into the early development process. If you focus on the product and forget about the customers you could find you have no one to sell your product to. Accept that you can’t create customer demand where it doesn’t exist. Don’t believe the approach that says if you offer it people will buy it, that might have worked once but it certainly doesn’t work today. With so much choice and internet shopping at our fingertips, you have to work from the customers backwards or you simply don’t know if your product will sell.

Don’t throw money at the problem

There is a time for funding enabling you to do more, of course. Extra funding is going to be vital to your business, but for now, more cash isn’t going to help you. What you need right now is short term milestones in your customer development. If we take a company like Tesco and their incredible rise to become the biggest online grocer in the country, we can see how this approach works. Tesco didn’t throw money at this, what they did was learn and discover. They found out what customers wanted, which was an easy way to order their groceries online and have them delivered, and they worked from there. And the did this with minimal investment in the process.