John Gauch 2025-08-03 John Gauch 2025-08-03

Struggling with Growth? You Can't Create Demand—You Need to Find It

If your emails, ads, or other sales and marketing activities are falling flat, it might be that you’re trying to generate demand where none exists. In this post, I break down what’s at the root of PMF and growth by reviewing the basics: uncovering real problems felt by people actively trying to make progress.

Illustration created with the assistance of ChatGPT by OpenAI.

Hi! I'm a startup fractional COO who works hip to hip with founders as their operating partner. I amplify founder contributions by serving as a thought partner and taking on critical and delegable growth and operations responsibilities, particularly for companies in the $1 to $10 million revenue range. Over 20+ years, I have worked on dozens of startups (Synervoz, Feldspar, Axiom, Spartan, IAN), helping build one industry-transforming business to exceed $100M in revenue and a second to (so far) nearly reach that very rare milestone.

Introduction

You've noticed that your emails aren't hitting. Or it's your ads. Or it’s your trade show booth meetings. Are your prospects numb? Is it the ICP? The channel? The messaging? Maybe AI is steering you wrong, or it’s just the times.

You're not alone.

If you’re the founder of a venture-backed startup, you’re rightfully preoccupied with the idea of finding product market fit (PMF). If you’re the founder of a profitable business with similar growth ambitions, you’re also looking for an unmet or undermet problem you can solve to increase sales.

It’s hard.

So, what will it take to grow your business? First and foremost, it will take getting the basics right.

You Can’t Manufacture Demand

To start, let's get on the same page with one fundamental idea: You can't manufacture demand for your product where it doesn't exist. You can only discover prospects by identifying the people who are already feeling friction in their lives and are trying to make progress.

If people don’t have a problem to solve, or there aren’t enough of them to meet your business’s requirements, there’s never going to be scalable PMF. There’s never going to be a promising new growth channel.

I won’t get into it here, but your solution also has to outperform the alternatives—not across the board, but at solving that specific problem, for that specific person, in that specific moment. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t even have to be great. It just has to be better than their current solution or workaround—or better than doing nothing.

Sales and marketing is about finding and connecting with people who are struggling with a problem and searching for a solution. They might not know precisely what they need at the start, but if your solution clearly helps them achieve a better future, you have a chance to be the one who helps them. Your most promising short-term prospects aren't the passive lookers either. It is the group of people actively looking and deciding how to solve their problem.

Some people may be stewing with their problem and not taking any action besides feeling unhappy. “Silently suffering” is how someone put it once. They're too early in the buying timeline to become a customer today. You want to connect with these people, too, and consider ways to nudge them along (more on that below). Initially, focus on prospects further along in the timeline.

Here's an example of what I mean: Say you build and license an audio SDK. Your potential market today consists of developers who are currently facing an audio challenge that your product solves. It's not every developer who is part of a team building audio tech.

No problem, no customer.

This framing draws on the Jobs to Be Done framework, co-developed by Bob Moesta.

Use the Four Forces

Bob also describes how four forces drive or resist the change entailed in buying something new:

Pushes (away from current pains)
Pulls (toward an exciting new solution)
Habits (comfort in what is familiar)
Anxieties (fear of what change means)

Purchases occur when the pushes and pulls are strong enough to overcome the friction of habits and anxieties.

Effective sales and marketing encourage a shift from the old way to the new way by strengthening the forces promoting change and reducing those causing drag. When you get that right, as Bob Moesta says, people pull your product into their lives.

Let's walk through two foundational and durable sales and marketing concepts that follow from these principles:

Read also: How to Learn Jobs to be Done

Provide Value

We said the purpose of a business is to help people make the progress they desire in their lives. It's not just a product obligation; that should be the mission of the organization as a whole. The entire customer experience should be designed with this end in mind, including sales and marketing.

Sales and marketing shouldn't push your product. Effective Sales and marketing helps people clarify their problems and shows them how to take the next steps to solve them. It’s a big, scary world out there, sales and marketers ought to see themselves as guides helping prospects choose a path to a solution. Engaging with customers like this also earns trust from genuinely being helpful.

That's delivering value.

Imagine how a prospective customer can move from where they are to where they want to be. This approach to sales and marketing centers on questions like:

How are people feeling now, in their struggling situation? What are people trying to do but can't? What's frustrating them?
What does better look like? How does your product help? What are its strengths and shortcomings?
To make a switch, from where someone is now, what do they need to know? What gets in their way? What are they afraid of? How do you tap into what motivates them and reduce their fears and anxieties?

Again, your go-to-market motion must make the math of the four forces work (pushes + pulls > habits + anxieties). No product bragging. No "educational content" that doesn't have a clear purpose. Foster self-motivation that helps someone move forward.

How does your sales and marketing stack up?

Show Up at Watering Holes

To apply this sales and marketing principle, you need to find people in a struggling situation. Go where they already are or find a way to bring them to you.

This isn't easy, but it's critical.

Look for the places and ways your audience has “opted in" to being a prospect. That's where you need to be, too.

Let me give you a concrete example. One particularly well-performing cold outbound campaign I worked on started by scraping public information about attendees at a niche audio industry event:

By attending that event, people raised their hands to say they were working on and cared about the kind of audio projects we care about, demonstrated by our audio SDK and related services.
We crafted an outbound email that linked to a YouTube talk on a timely, thorny audio challenge by one of our team members who also attended the event. The talk was technical and useful; it was not a sales pitch. Many event attendees may have been wrestling with or would be curious about the subject matter.

The campaign emails had a 55% open rate, a 30% click-through rate, and an 18% reply rate. It also converted a new customer immediately and opened up conversations with several others.

Why did we achieve those results?

We'd zeroed in on a much more promising audience than "every developer on a team building an audio product or feature." Still, not everyone who got our email was a potential customer. But by attending the event, they'd raised their hand to say they wanted to learn something new. Many were likely trying to connect the dots to understand or solve an audio challenge.

We distinguished ourselves by demonstrating our expertise as audio problem solvers. Even if we didn't address the exact problem someone was working on, the talk topic was curiosity-arousing, and it doesn't take a massive leap for a watcher to bet that if we could help with one audio challenge, we could help with others like it.

Are you showing up when your most likely customers come knocking?

Organic SEO is often underutilized by entrepreneurs because it requires a bit of time to yield results. It's sidelined in favor of performance marketing or cold outbounds perhaps. But organic SEO is how you get discovered by people actively searching for solutions to a problem. This is huge. These people have intent. They're already looking for you. You don't need to chase them; you just need to be easy to find.

And this is more important now than ever.

It's not just people searching. It's AI agents.

The same general principles that help you rank in Google will help you get pulled into AI-generated suggestions, too. Stick with the fundamentals: In the simplest terms, create genuinely helpful content, keep it updated, and keep at it.

Where are the watering holes your prospects are hanging out right now?

Example: From My Business

As a fractional COO, I work with founders who have already achieved considerable success with their companies, closing a Seed or Series A financing and generating $1 million to $10 million in annual revenue. Many of them are in tech, but not all. Some are venture-backed and others are profitable growth businesses.

However, not every founder meeting that fits that description is a real prospect.

My prospects are unhappy with how their business is going:

Finding scalable PMF after early traction might be proving difficult.
Growth may not be where they want it.
They may be feeling the team isn't aligned or executing well.
Business operations may be creaking, groaning, or breaking altogether.

They want to see giant leaps forward, as well, not incremental improvements.

They're likely overworked and stressed, as a result, which leaves them emotionally and physically frayed, from doing too much. Still, they’re fighters, with big ambitions. It’s not just about money either. Many aspire to transform the very nature of the industries in which they operate.

These founders we feeling a lot of pressure.

Again, I don't serve every founder fitting the high-level demographic criteria I shared (e.g., someone running a $1 to $10M business). They need to be in a struggling situation, similar to what I shared.

They’re not my prospective customer if:

They have the support they need, and it’s going well.
They lack the support they need, you don’t want to do anything about it, and they’re okay with the implications.

The people I help are unhappy (and likely aware of it) with their current situation, and they're either passively or actively exploring how to solve for it. They are on the buying timeline somewhere between their "first thought” and deciding on a purchase.

How did they get into that situation? When the company grows, founders need to grow too. They need to adapt their role. Too often, they try to do it all in the face of increasing challenges, such as:

finding PMF or a new growth lever amid growing operational demands, or
orchestrating and managing their scaleup if they've tapped into growth

The founder role needs to change, and they may require an operating partner to make that happen—someone to take on mission-critical but delegable tasks, allowing them to focus on the top two to three things that only they can do, as CEO and founder.

My prospects are dissatisfied and want to make changes. When the math of the four forces works out, they work with me or implement another solution to make progress. The role of my go-to-market activities is to help founders figure out what they need and how to choose the right solution to achieve their personal and business goals.

To illustrate, as part of my content marketing efforts, I wrote a LinkedIn post that discusses how founders can become stuck trying to do it all in their businesses, why this is an undesirable situation, and how to start getting out of it.

I've connected with founders where they are, on LinkedIn.

I've specified who I want to speak to by asking if they feel they may be a bottleneck to their business.
For those who feel this way, I hope I've helped them understand why this might be happening.
And I’ve suggested ways to get out of the situation—i.e., baby steps on the buying timeline toward making a switch from what they are doing now.

The LinkedIn post isn't about me; it's about the founder. However, it’s doing the important work of helping the founder and creating a potential future customer.

Conclusion

The take-away: Treat sales and marketing as a genuine effort to help someone solve a meaningful problem in their lives and turn that demand into a purchase.

You can't create demand. But you can spot it, understand it, and work with it. If your sales and marketing efforts help someone in a struggling situation make sense of what they're facing and take one step forward, that's a win. And that's how you grow, by putting one step in front of the other.

Want help applying these ideas to your business? Reach out or follow my contributions on LinkedIn.

John Gauch 2025-07-30 John Gauch 2025-07-30

Journey of a Founder: Series A Is a Reckoning—Operator Imperatives for Getting to Series B

The Journey of a Founder series continues. You’ve raised a Series A. You’ve got early traction and capital to grow. But now the real work begins. What does it feel like to lead a company through this phase, and what actually helps you reach Series B? In this founder/operator roundtable, we explore what happens after the early wins, from hiring and trust-building to evolving your founder role and avoiding the ops pitfalls that can sink momentum. This is the messy middle, what I sometimes call “the reckoning.”

Event 1—Part 1: Hosted by John Gauch and Jimmy Malik.

Illustration showing startup event title and participants John Gauch Jimmy Malik Alice Nawfal and Justin Etkin for part 1 blog post

Hi there - I'm a startup fractional COO who works hip to hip with founders as their operating partner. I amplify founder contributions by serving as a thought partner and assuming critical and delegable growth and operations responsibilities, particularly for companies in the $1 to $10 million revenue range. Over 20+ years, I have worked on dozens of startups (Synervoz, Feldspar, Axiom, Spartan, IAN), helping build one industry-transforming business to exceed $100M in revenue and a second to (so far) nearly reach that very rare milestone.

Jimmy Malik and I hosted this second roundtable in our Journey of a Founder series in collaboration with the Operators Guild (OG), where we're both members. Our guest co-founders (and fellow OGers) were Alice Nawful, of Notabene, and Justin Etkin, of Tropic.

The roundtable video recording isn't available publicly; however, I have summarized some of the top insights for you here. I also recommend checking out the OG if you're a company founder, co-founder, or operator at a high-growth business looking for a like-minded community of peers.

We don't cover everything you need to know to run a business, but we cover a lot of ground. Enjoy.

Introduction

Scaling a startup from Series A to Series C is full of tough choices, shifting priorities, and relentless tests of leadership. What worked at Series A can fall apart at Series B, or later, in the face of increasing demands for growth, structure, and disciplined execution.

This post breaks down what it feels like, critical areas to focus on, and lessons every operator can apply. These insights aren't just for venture-backed companies either; they're relevant if you're the founder of a growing business that needs to evolve from scrappy, founder-led leadership to making major leaps in performance.

(This is Part 1. If you're looking for Part 2 on Series B → C, read it here.)

What Series A to Series B Feels Like

You've shown notable progress with the business. However, it's not yet clear you're on a reliably upward trajectory. There's going to be a lot more fight before you can declare victory (or defeat). Founder-financed companies often find themselves in a similar spot after they've proven their business works when there's potential and the path forward isn't obvious.

I see this period as a reckoning.

The basics that got you here still matter: understanding customers, testing assumptions, making thoughtful decisions, hiring smartly. Capital in the bank doesn't change that; if anything, it raises the bar. What are you going to do with that money?

At the same time, the work itself shifts. The breadth of problems, the pace of decisions, and the complexity of the business all spike. One hour, you're deep in the weeds fixing a broken operational process; the next, you're selling a senior leader you want to hire on your vision. This context switching is relentless. And because the data you wish you had doesn't exist yet, you need to rely on gut feel over hard knowledge more than you like.

This stage also brings a psychological shift: Trust becomes an increasingly valuable currency. The only way you, the founder, can share the management burden with teammates is if you have trust in them and the way you work together. To reach this point, a high-performing company has likely tapped an operating partner to the CEO, allowing the CEO to promote the company vision and focus on strategy and top initiatives only they can lead. If this hasn't happened yet, and you want the business to continue to move forward in leaps and bounds, it's time.

Likely, you're gearing up to hire for other roles, too. In addition to filling staff roles to keep up with growth, you may be bringing on more experienced people who know more than you do in their area of expertise. That's the point. But it can still feel jarring when you're ready to make your first full-time finance hire, for instance, and you realize how much more they know than you do. It's humbling.

Meanwhile, your operational foundation gets stress-tested: finance, legal, HR, and other business ops. Building operations to date has been iterative, making trade-offs and putting together "good enough" processes to serve your current and near-term future needs. Systems or processes you justifiably deprioritized before might cost you time, money, and goodwill now. You may need to revamp what you had prioritized and put into place earlier, and quickly catch up on things you ignored or hacked together … or risk dragging down the business.

In this period, as well, unexpected and hairy challenges lurk. Every company has its version. The business is not entirely settled. You're confronting unknowns as well as potentially disruptive events in the external environment, like a shift in market demand. There's always something material still to figure out.

Was product‑market fit (PMF) real or a fleeting bump?

Is the market big enough to support your scale objectives, or you we about to hit a wall?
Are you ready for the larger customers and new segments you’re chasing?

One thing that's not unique to this period is the careful decision-making required around how to use your resources: Remember that cash in the bank? For a venture-backed concern, this is your latest round. For a high-growth business, it's your accumulated war chest. You'll need to make deliberate decisions between extending runway, investing in critical infrastructure, and accelerating growth.

Series A is about continuing to refine the business and building certainty while everything—your business model, your market, your product, your processes, your team, and you—is being stress‑tested. It's exciting. It's demanding. It's a trial that you need to survive to build and sustain a successful business that has a big impact on the world.

Read also: Journey of a Founder: A Startup Story

Top Imperatives

Remain customer-focused and dialed into the problem you solve for them. Stay curious. Treat PMF as a moving target. There may be a difference between the early signs of PMF (what gets you to a Series A) and the durable, scalable PMF you need to reach Series B and beyond.
Shift your time, as founder, from the early days, when you did it all. Ideally, you did that before now. Less time in the weeds, more big-picture leadership. You can't solve every problem.

As the founder, you need to reduce your information advantage by spreading what you know among the team. (It can feel scary.) The quality of your operational rhythm dictates how comfortable you may be staying out of the weeds. Bi-directional processes giving all parties the information they need will tell the founder where the team is headed. If that's the right direction, you'll be able to focus confidently on your uniue founder’s agenda. Low trust resulting from poor hires or operational deficiencies is often what leads to micromanagement. When this is all working perfectly, it can still feel stressful, since you aren't as close to the details of the business anymore.

Accept that your team is in a period of flux. You still need standout generalists, and you're also bringing on subject matter experts and possibly introducing different levels of seniority. It's going to get a bit messy. Don't let your ego get in the way of hiring people who outclass you. Be careful: It's tempting to over-title early hires or promote generalists too quickly.

The company may be transforming itself every six months. Don't let your leadership approach or the team fall behind. Pick a frequency (quarterly, for example) and conduct a holistic check-in on the current business needs and how you and your team is aligned.

What's working well?
What's not working?
What's missing?
Who can step in or step it up?
How do you fill the gaps?

Suppose someone isn’t scaling to match business needs. They may need additional support, or if the situation can’t be improved, you may need to n that case, acting sooner may feel uncomfortable than later, but it may be the right move.

Prioritize like your life depends on it. The team can't do everything that needs to be done either. Be explicit about what matters most right now. Consciously pick what you're going to knock out of the park, what's going to get midling attention, and what's less important. Be explicit about it. Decide how to sequence initiatives.
Keep ops lightweight but strong enough not to break. The startup debt that hurts the most isn't always engineering. It may be in finance, customer success, or another area. Stay alert. Invest in the key areas. Expect many of the ways you do things now will break, and you'll need to patch them up or replace them later.

Finally, avoid this misstep: Growth is the ultimate imperative, but so is avoiding an existential crisis originating from the failure of the company's operations. Ask yourself: What do we need to be working on today that might not have an immediate impact but will be critical soon? Some improvements have long lead times. Plan the rebuild before events make change a crisis or impossible.

If you're in this stretch of business building (i.e., wrestling with growth, hiring, patchingor rewiting operations), I'm always up for a conversation.

Read Part 2: Series B to Series C—Scaling Challenges and Leadership Imperatives

John Gauch 2024-05-15 John Gauch 2024-05-15

Key Strategies for Business Growth: 10 Steps to Expand and Thrive

This month I discuss effective strategies for business growth, with special emphasis on startups. I cover topics from market penetration to digital transformation. The content will help CEOs and founders develop their own plans to expand and thrive.

Listen to the podcast version of this blog post, an AI experiment.

A finger pointing to a graph representing business growth — Photo by Lukas from Pexels.

In case you’re new to the site - I'm John Gauch, a consultant with extensive experience in business operations and growth. I specialize in helping startups implement strategies effectively in both areas. As a hands-on fractional COO, I work with founders and CEOs through each step of the process, tailoring solutions to fit your unique needs and objectives.

Are you looking to elevate your business to the next level? Whether you're a startup aiming to scale quickly or an established company seeking new avenues for expansion, understanding the right growth strategies is crucial. In this comprehensive guide, I will discuss 10 essential steps that can help your business. These strategies have been curated to provide actionable insights and proven methods to drive growth.

1. Market Penetration

Market penetration involves increasing your company's share of existing markets with your product or service offerings. This strategy focuses on capturing a larger portion of the market by attracting customers from your competitors, attracting people who aren’t doing anything but have a problem to solve, or convincing current customers to use more of your product.

To effectively penetrate the market, businesses employ various tactics, such as competitive pricing, enhancing their products, and marketing campaigns.

Early on, at the beginning of your startup journey, you will improve the odds of capturing a market by building a product or service that addresses an unmet or under-met customer problem. Look for people who are struggling with current solutions or frustrated with their options and doing nothing. Design and build a product or service that is better at helping people to make the progress they desire.

Later on, offering promotions, discounts, and loyalty programs are options you can look at to incentivize customers to choose your product over others. Additionally, increasing your advertising efforts to raise product or brand awareness may positively impact your market share. It's crucial to continuously analyze market trends and customer feedback to adapt and refine your specific strategies, ensuring they meet the evolving needs of your target audience.

2. Market Development

Market development is the strategy of entering new markets with your existing product. This approach is for businesses looking to expand their reach and tap into new customer segments. Market development can involve geographical expansion, targeting different demographic groups, or exploring new distribution channels. Startups, creating new to the world products, are by definition entering a new market.

For geographical expansion, companies might consider establishing new sales capabilities in different regions or countries, depending on the demand and cultural fit of their products. Another approach is to identify and target new customer segments that may benefit from your product but have not been previously marketed to. Utilizing online sales platforms can also aid in reaching a broader audience without the need for physical presence. Whether you are a startup or an incumbent company promoting an existing product, market development requires thorough market research to understand the new target market's preferences and potential barriers to entry.

3. Product Development

Product development focuses on creating new products or enhancing existing ones to meet customer needs better. This strategy aims to stimulate growth by offering innovative solutions that address market demands and improve customer satisfaction.

Developing sound customer insights is essential for successful product development. Big companies developing new products might call this “research and development” (R&D). By understanding market trends and customers’ lives, businesses can identify opportunities for innovation. This might involve introducing entirely new products, improving features of existing products, or adapting products for different uses.

Collaboration with customers during the development phase can also provide valuable insights and ensure the final product aligns with their expectations. Ongoing product development will not only help retain existing customers but also attract new ones by keeping your offerings relevant and competitive in the market.

Read also: How to Learn Jobs to be Done

4. Diversification

Diversification involves expanding your business into new markets with new products. This strategy is also pursued to reduce risk by spreading it across different products or markets, ensuring that a decline in one area does not severely impact the overall business.

There are two main types of diversification: related and unrelated.

Related diversification means expanding into a new market with products that are connected to the existing problem your offerings solve for customers. For example, a company that produces high-perfomance running footwear might start offering high-performance running apparel--all connected to readying an athlete for their sport. Unrelated diversification involves entering markets where you solve a different problem for customers, such as a high-performance running footwear company beginning to offer trendy casual footwear.

It is important to consider your company’s current capabilities when making this decision. Does this entail developing a new profit formula, processes, or resources, and what’s the implication of your answer? While diversification can offer significant growth opportunities, it also comes with increased risk and requires substantial market research and strategic planning to ensure successful implementation.

5. Joint Ventures and Partnerships

Joint ventures and partnerships allow businesses to collaborate with other companies to leverage each other's strengths and resources. This strategy can help businesses enter new markets, share risks, and access new customer bases more effectively than going it alone.

In a joint venture, two or more companies create a new entity to undertake a specific project or business activity, sharing profits, losses, and control. Partnerships can range from strategic alliances to long-term collaborations where companies work together while remaining independent. By combining expertise and resources, businesses can innovate faster and achieve goals that might be difficult on their own. Successful joint ventures and partnerships require clear communication, aligned objectives, and mutual trust to navigate the complexities of shared business operations.

6. Mergers and Acquisitions

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) involve the consolidation of companies or assets. This strategy is often pursued to achieve rapid growth, gain competitive advantage, or enter new markets without the need to build new operations from the ground up.

Mergers occur when two companies combine to form a new entity, while acquisitions happen when one company takes over another. The benefits of M&A include increased market share, access to new technologies, expanded customer bases, and enhanced operational efficiencies. However, M&A can be complex and risky, involving significant financial investment and cultural integration challenges. Successful mergers and acquisitions require thorough due diligence, clear strategic alignment, and effective integration planning to realize the potential benefits fully.

7. Digital Transformation

Digital transformation involves integrating digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to customers. This strategy is essential in today's digital age, where technology can significantly enhance efficiency, customer experience, and competitiveness.

Startup companies have the advantage of building their business from a blank page. So they can implement digital practices and processes from the beginning, without replacing existing manual or analog approaches.

Key aspects of digital transformation for more mature companies include automating processes, utilizing data analytics for informed decision-making, and adopting new digital tools and platforms.

For example, implementing customer relationship management (CRM) software can streamline interactions with clients, while leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) can offer personalized customer experiences and predictive analytics. Additionally, shifting to e-commerce platforms can expand market reach and provide customers with more convenient online purchasing options. Embracing digital transformation, and fostering a mindset of continuous innovation and adaptability, may require a cultural shift among some individuals within any organization.

8. Customer-Centric Approach

A customer-centric approach places the needs and preferences of customers at the forefront of business decisions. I also think about this as keeping top of mind the specific problem the company solves for its customers. By focusing on delivering an exceptional customer experience that helps someone make the progress they seek in their life, businesses can enhance satisfaction, build loyalty, beat competitors, and drive growth.

To adopt a customer-centric approach, companies must prioritize collecting and analyzing customer feedback to understand customers better. This can be achieved through various customer discovery or design thinking techniques (from one-on-one interviews to surveys to social media engagement). Businesses must then strive to apply those insights by tailoring products and services to individual customer preferences. Implementing robust customer service practices, such as timely support and proactive communication, can further strengthen customer relationships. By consistently putting customer understanding first, businesses can differentiate themselves in the market and create a loyal customer base that supports sustained growth.

Read also my Medium blog posts on customer discovery techniques.

9. Data-Driven Decision Making

Data-driven decision-making involves using data and analytics to guide business strategies and operations. This approach enables companies to make informed decisions based on insights rather than intuition or guessing, leading to more effective and efficient outcomes.

To leverage data-driven decision-making, businesses need to collect relevant data from various sources, such as customer interactions, market trends, and internal processes. Utilizing advanced analytics tools and techniques, companies can extract valuable insights from this data to identify opportunities for improvement and growth.

For instance, analyzing sales data can reveal patterns in customer behavior, helping to optimize marketing efforts and product offerings. Additionally, data-driven decision-making can enhance operational efficiency by identifying bottlenecks and areas for cost reduction. By integrating data into the decision-making process, businesses can stay agile and responsive to changing market conditions.

10. Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility

Sustainability and corporate responsibility focus on conducting business in a way that is environmentally friendly and socially responsible. This strategy not only helps protect the planet but also enhances a company's reputation and fosters long-term success. In this same vein, companies have a responsibility to support the learning, growth, and development of their team members.

Sustainable practices include reducing carbon footprints, minimizing waste, and using renewable resources. Companies can also engage in corporate social responsibility initiatives, such as supporting community projects, ensuring fair employment practices, and promoting diversity and inclusion. By adopting sustainable and responsible practices, businesses can attract similarly-minded consumers, meet regulatory requirements, and build a positive brand image. Additionally, sustainability efforts often lead to operational efficiencies and cost savings, contributing to overall business growth. Embracing sustainability and corporate responsibility is ethical but also strategic, positioning companies for future success in a world increasingly focused on environmental and social impact.

A Path to Sustainable Business Growth and Success

Implementing the right growth strategies is crucial for any business aiming to expand and thrive today. By thinking about market penetration, market development, product development, diversification, joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, digital transformation, a customer-centric approach, data-driven decision-making, and sustainable practices, you can improve the odds of your business achieving substantial growth and long-term success.

These 10 strategies provide a comprehensive framework for navigating the complexities of business expansion. They will help you enhance your market presence, innovate continuously, build strong customer relationships, and operate responsibly. Remember though, the key to successful implementation lies in tailoring these strategies to your unique business context and staying adaptable to changing market conditions.

If you’re a startup CEO, founder, or entrepreneur, and you want to chat about evaluating or implementing these strategies and whether I can help, I’d love to connect. Learn about my services and please reach out.

John Gauch 2023-11-12 John Gauch 2023-11-12

What I Need to Know to Make Investor Referrals

These are the six things I need to know to make investor referrals for CEOs and founding team members when we haven’t worked together before. Answering these six questions is also a valuable shorthand for quickly vetting any new business idea.

Photo representing investor networking — Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels.

In case this is your first time at the site - I'm John Gauch, a consultant with extensive experience in business operations and growth. I specialize in helping startups implement both strategies effectively. As a fractional COO, I work with founders and CEOs through each step, tailoring solutions to your unique needs and objectives.

I love to be helpful whenever I can be. This is particularly true when it comes to supporting startup CEOs and founding teams. Making introductions is one way I can do that.

The intro could be to someone with expertise in an industry or a specific role (etc.). Sometimes, it's to investors. If I haven't worked with a company, it can be a little challenging to make investor introductions, though.

To address that difficulty, I've summarized the essential information I need to know to introduce a company to investors in situations where I haven't worked with that company for an extended time.

It’s also useful as a shorthand for quickly vetting any new business idea.

There are six questions.

The first question is: What is the problem to be solved?

In particular, I want to know whether an unmet or under-met need is arising in people’s lives. I'm looking for something visceral. I sometimes ask people to imagine the first part of a typical Shark Tank pitch, where the entrepreneur describes some hardship they've experienced or observed. People aren’t going to change their ways if they don’t feel a push arising from an uncomfortable situation.

The second question is connected: What are the existing alternatives to solving this problem?

Maybe it's a current something that falls short in accomplishing a task. Maybe there isn't a good existing alternative at all, and people are silently struggling--unhappy and unable to progress toward the better future they imagine.

The third question is: When does this situation arise?

What's the specific context when this unmet or under-met need shows up? Again, the idea here is to be very specific. Who are the people this happens to? When do they face the situation? What are they doing at that time? Why are they doing it?

You'll notice very little about the product so far, which is by design. Most important is whether you have identified and can describe a compelling problem worth solving. That's what we're trying to understand with these first three questions. Once you've gotten this far, you should tell an in-depth, true story about a struggling situation in which people find themselves.

Read also: How to Learn Jobs to be Done

Now you can answer question 4: What does your product do?

The description should detail how the product bridges the current gap between what people are trying to do and what they can achieve now.

Part five follows: How big is this opportunity?

Is this a $1 million revenue opp or something much bigger? Ash Murray suggests entrepreneurs start with a back-of-the-envelope calculation and then move onto a more detailed estimation, in each case looking at your annual recurring revenue in month 12 of year 3 after your launch. I like his approach.

I created my own step-by-step guide (originally for a University of Hawaii startup program) that you can find here.

Ideally, you’ll also show the total addressable market size, and how it was determined (hint: it should be based in part on the information you’ve described in questions one to three).

The last question, and it’s often a hard one to answer: Why now?

Why could your product only exist now versus a year ago or 10 years ago? There are many intelligent and creative people in the world, and many are struggling to progress in different aspects of their lives. A compelling “why now” answer suggests you’re working on a problem that could only be solved recently. This increases the attractiveness of the idea significantly because it could be a genuine new-to-the-world innovation.

It raises questions if your product could have existed anytime in recent history and hasn't or did but doesn’t now.

Maybe there isn't a problem to solve after all. People have tried and failed, and you’re just the latest making an attempt.
Maybe there's an issue with feasibility. People have tried and failed because the product can’t be built or the business model math doesn’t work.
Maybe the product isn’t differentiated from a bunch of current alternatives. It’s just one more product in a long list of similar products that have been around for a while.

If there’s not a good “why now” answer, it doesn't mean you can't continue to build your business and maybe even thrive, but it suggests it may not be an explosive new opportunity with tons of growth potential.

Could you have discovered an enormous opportunity that others have missed or failed to execute? I suppose so, but in that case, could you explain why that may be.

If I could only ask an entrepreneur one question about their company and product it would probably be this.

Answering these six questions will help ensure your new business is on the right track and help me or anyone else share your message with others.

What's the unmet or undermet problem?
What are the current alternatives that are falling short?
What is the context?
What is the product?
What is the scale of the opportunity?
Why is this idea coming into existence now?

For my covering intro email to investors, I’d also love to highlight the traction you've gotten so far (e.g., notable customer numbers, wrapping up a round, a brand-name investor) and what you’re looking for from the meeting (e.g., a networking meeting to talk about the space you’re operating in or a call to see if they’re interested in participating in a fundraising round). Sot let me know that too.

With this information, I can make an informed and meaningful investor introduction that will serve both parties well.

I’m always happy to chat about business building. Please reach out to learn more about my work or just to be and stay in touch.

John Gauch 2023-08-29 John Gauch 2023-08-29

Estimating Product Market Opportunity

I often scratch my head trying to understand the market opportunity described in many startup investor presentations. I’m not saying it’s easy to measure by any means, and in this post I lay out an alternative way to to think about and calculate this popular figure.

Image showing common desk tools representing the analysis required to determine a product's market opportunity — Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels.

First time here? I'm John Gauch, a consultant with extensive experience in business operations and growth planning. I specialize in helping startups implement strategies effectively in both areas. In my work as a fractional COO, I work with founders and CEOs through each step of the process, tailoring solutions to fit your unique needs and objectives.

TAM (Total Addressable / Available Market), SAM (Serviceable Available Market) and SOM (Service Obtainable Market) are popular conventions that we all see in investor pitch decks.

TAM can loosely categorize opportunity scale (large, medium, small), for example.

I am really interested in a figure sometimes captured in the SAM or SOM, but this is case by case depending on how people calculate them.

The market opportunity number I like to see is this:

Equation for alternative market opportunity calculation

Specifically excluded from the number:

I do not view this as a static figure. We can update it if/as our customer understanding changes. We can also handicap the number to reflect the likely prospects today, versus those experiencing barriers to purchase due to access, cost, skill or time, for instance.

I am not saying this is easy math or we can do it with absolute, scientific precision, but there is a ton of value in just trying. Calculating market opportunity in this way requires understanding:

the specific problem a product helps customers to solve
the situation when that problem arises
the better way customers are seeking

To uncover these often-hidden customer insights, we can use lean approaches, such as interviews, which go beyond what we can learn in a survey or focus group.

Read also: How to Learn Jobs to be Done

What we discover will inform a lot more than a market opportunity number. It will likely inform our strategy, product and marketing approach, helping us to build and scale our businesses.

If you’re a startup CEO or founder, and you feel it would be interesting to chat, I’d love to connect. Learn about my services and please reach out.

This blog post appeared originally on LinkedIn.