This is the last in a four-part series about starting a company. The previous posts have been about taking a project and making it into a business, learning to understand your customer and developing a product
This last post is all about ramping up. Here, I’ll tell you how to take the business you’ve started and grow it.
A recap
If you’ve been following this whole series then you should already have a pretty strong understanding of who your customer is and what problem you’re solving. You should have a strong idea of why your solution works for your customers. Most importantly, you are absolutely certain that your solution will make you money.
Growth
The next step is to grow your strong understanding of the customer and the solution they need into a profitable business.
Acorn
If there’s one message about growing your business that you should repeat in the mirror each morning, set as your GMail password and have tattooed on the inside of your eyeballs, it’s this: focus on one user first.
Forget scale for now. Scaling a product that isn’t making customers happy wastes a lot of time and effort, and, until you focus on making an individual customer happy, you won’t understand why.
Instead of thinking about scale, go to one potential customer and work closely with them to make the product something they love. Get this right and your first customer will be yelling your company’s name from the rooftops for you.
When you’ve got one delighted customer, go find more. But do it slowly. If a prospective customer ends up not buying from you, find out why and understand the problem. Can they not afford the product? Did your sales pitch miss something out? Or had you misunderstood something about who your customers are?
Grow slowly, understanding and delighting your customers on the way.
Sapling
To start with, you’re going to want to meet your customers face-to-face. But after you’ve made a few sales, you should start trying to move to digital contact with your customers. Your understanding of the customer should be really strong by now, and you should have perfected your sales pitch when talking to customers in person.
Social networks, friends and contacting potential users on twitter and forums all let you have individual contact with potential customers. Remember everything you’ve learned about who the customer is. Find people who have the problem you’re solving and give them your sales pitch. Does your sales pitch still work remotely? Or do you need to tweak it, and your understanding of what the customer needs?
Perfecting your understanding of your customer and perfecting a sales pitch that means you don’t have to be in the room with the customer are how you’ll scale your idea.
Oak
You understand your customer and their problem. You know what aspects of your product need to go in a sales pitch in order to get a sale, and you know how to give that pitch verbally.
At this stage, it’s worth setting up a webpage to sell your product if you haven’t already. Give your sales pitch: show the user you understand their problem, show how your solution solves the problem and make it easy for them to buy it.
But making a webpage doesn’t bring people to it. One of the best ways to send traffic is by working out which webpages on other sites will be found by prospective customers, and linking from those pages to your sales pitch.
Most often, these will be forums. If your customers’ problem is “I keep losing my keys”, then find every forum post titled “How do you find lost keys?” and link back to your sales pitch. Use your knowledge of the customer to target them specifically.
This doesn’t mean you should post fake reviews. That’s not cool. And if you have a strong understanding of your customers, you shouldn’t have to. “Hey, I’ve actually made something for people like you here: [link]” is a better idea than posting “I use [link] and it’s changed my life and everyone should buy it.” No-one doubts the honesty of the first one; everyone doubt the honesty of the second.
Adverts are useful too, but start with forums. Forum posts are (normally) free.
Split testing
Split testing is a big topic worth a post in itself. The idea is that you can test small, subtle changes on the psychology of your prospective customers. Do you get more purchases when the button is nearer the top of the page? Should the button be blue instead of green?
When you’re starting to really grow fast, these changes could make a difference of a few percent in the number of customers who buy from you. And a few percent can be a huge amount of money.
Summary
Don’t be in a hurry to scale. Start by making a small number of users really happy with your product. Grow by finding more people like them. Start by contacting each customer individually so you can understand why your pitch does or doesn’t work.
Once you’ve got the pitch down to a T, sell to people you’ve never met via the web. Try to target people who have the problem you’re solving. Use split testing to decide on the fine details.
Thanks to Tom Carver for reviewing this post.