In general, many startups and small businesses tend to over-plan their scaling. Scaling is excellent; it will eventually bring money to your business – but it’s pointless to plan your growth routes before you even have a functional car (if you get the analogy).
However, many founders spend hours or weeks crafting their growth strategies when they have only started doing business.
Forget scaling before a product-market fit
What’s the point in planning your growth if you’re not sure in the first place if your product is something the market wants? Market research is excellent but insufficient to ensure you’ve built something worthwhile to buy.
You need the famous PMF, the product-market fit. A glorious moment you realize you’ve built something that will sell. You will feel it, but getting to that stage is not easy.
Sadly, many don’t make it to this inflection point. One of the reasons is they’ve spent too much time (and money) on thinking how to grow their product instead of getting valuable feedback from the first users. Even worse, they’ve developed features based on their “hunch.”
Feedback and research are what you need to tailor your offering to market needs.
Do things manually before you automate them
Doing things manually will save time developing features you don’t need immediately automated. It’s an additional time-saver, even if it doesn’t seem like that.
How? First, you will know your business inside-out and first-hand experience the pain points you can solve with automation. Second, once you identify the paint points, it’s much easier to develop solutiuons.
Focus on your first user.
Focus on your first user, then the 10th, then the 100th, and so on. Build your product incrementally and listen to market feedback. People’s needs shift, and you need to adapt along the way. Be agile and fast.
You will start growing once everything falls into place. Then amplify it!
Additional info
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