Focus first on the tangible value you bring to people
Armed with the right knowledge to start out in the business world, you really want to focus first on the details of your product or service. You must be able to clearly articulate and communicate the tangible value and benefits that you will bring to people through your product or service. Your product or service is only a means to an end.
People really don’t care about your product or service. They only care about the outcome or benefits to them after using your product or service. That’s why good marketers focus on benefits and not features of their product or service.
So, what’s your elevator speech? What’s the outcome you want people to experience?
You must be able to articulate your value and benefits in one single succinct sentence.
Focusing on money alone will not get you very far. It’s a short-term thinking that will not make you successful. Money should not be your primary focus. Money will naturally follow when there are satisfied customers who have enjoyed using your product or service to meet their needs or wants.
Cultivate a ‘servant hood’ mindset where you serve people. Your business gives you the license to serve people. Focusing on people rather than money helps you remind yourself of the true reason why you started your business in the first place.
That’s why you really want to get your winning products or services right from the beginning of your money making journey. The aim is to minimise the business side of things, at least for the moment, until you have a winning product or service that your customers will die for, a product or service that will generate value and benefit for them by solving their immediate problems.
Winning products and services will market themselves. It’s the other side of the marketing coin.
Regardless of whether you have any specific ideas or not, what you think your customers want and what they actually need may not be the same thing. You must listen carefully and intently to their language, their emotional need, their pain points, their struggles, etc. In doing so, you develop a clearer picture of what they’ll buy from you and what might be a misfire.
The difference about wants or needs: needs are things that are required (e.g., kids should be eating vegetables) whereas wants are things that are not necessary but desired or wished for (e.g., kids wanting to eat candies instead of vegetables).
Cultivate a testing and learning mindset
To be sure, start small and simple. This will enable you to quickly implement your idea. Speed of implementation is important because as time passes, procrastination sets in and you may not even get moving.
Always test and validate your ideas with real people. Don’t assume and make an “ass out of you and me” (ass-u-me).
Develop a ‘minimum viable product’ (MVP) or a good enough ‘proof of concept’ product or service. Then test, learn, and validate your assumptions by selling your minimum viable product on existing marketplaces like Fiverr, eBay, and Amazon, depending on whether it is product or service.
Launching first with a minimum viable product keeps your risk, exposure, and expense low (or nil). It gives you the license to test the waters and validate your ‘good enough’ product or service with potential customers. It confirms whether your product or service fully meets the needs of your target audience. Most importantly, it confirms or modifies your assumptions about your customers and whether your product or service actually meets their needs.
A point to note here is that a ‘good enough’ product or service does not mean that it’s of poor quality. All elements of a quality product or service must exist to fully gain peoples’ trust and confidence. This is important. Otherwise, they will not buy from you.
However, functionalities or features of this product or service may be limited (for now) until you know more about your customer’s desire for more features. When they believe in you and your product or service, they should be more than willing to pay more for new features.
In essence, the minimum viable product is a practical process that you can repeat over and over again to identify and eliminate your riskiest assumptions, to find the smallest possible experiment to test and validate those assumptions, and to use the results of your testing and validation to course correct, improve, and learn about yourself and your ability to run and sustain a business and a product or service in the long term.
As the result of testing your product or service, you may end up saying, “running a business is not my cup of tea”. If so, it’s OK to walk away from starting a business knowing that you have given it a try.