Whether you’re selling a product, yourself, or your company, you have to do four things:
- Make what the customer wants
- There’s what you do.
- Then there’s what the customer wants. 70% of companies fail 2 years into the game because they didn’t make what the customer wanted or needed. Be in the 30% who succeed.
- Price it accordingly
- Be good fast or cheap. Pick 2.
- Price is what the market will bear.
- It really comes down to the two most important specifications and how you position the product in the market place for customer need.
- Get your village to support you
- OK, really you need to create the village you and your company need to succeed.
- What are your strengths?
- What do you need someone else to do (you can’t do everything)?
- Who can be a partner, a mentor, a trusted advisor?
- It is about who you know.
- Make a plan
- A business plan is really a hypothesis which combines all of your assumptions about the market, the pricing, your ability to make and ship the product, and costs.
- Then you test the plan in the real world.
- Finally, you validate or invalidate your hypotheses.
- Without a plan you won’t really know where you were correct and incorrect.
- As they say in the Navy: “Fail to plan; plan to fail.”