Accelerate Your Startup: Tuning the Engine

Intro

two common mistakes being made by startups:

  1. Companies spend too much attempting to grow the business when it’s not ready for such growth; or
  2. Companies don’t spend enough money when the business is ready to scale.

three different startup phases:

  1. Finding Product-Market Fit
  2. Finding a scalable and repeatable sales model
  3. Scaling the business

What is product/market fit?

Basically, a startup has Product-Market Fit when it has: • A set of customers excited enough about your product to pay for it. Usually, that payment is cash, but sometimes it’s time. As Facebook, Twitter and Google have proven, if you can get enough customers spending time with your product, there’s usually a way to monetize it. • A customer base large enough to create a viable business.

Lower your burn rate during the search for product/market fit

Also, ask yourself two questions about each of your assertions:

  1. Is the problem you’re tackling important to the customer?
  2. Do your solutions really solve the problem?

Reduce your burn rate; increase your time

No one can predict how long it will take to find product/market fit. therefore you need to set your burn rate as low as possible.

Once you have evidence of product/market fit, you can then find a repeatable and scalable sales model, which I’ll address in my next post.