Business Growth Cheat Sheet: Go-to-market Guide for Founders

Step 2: Build a Product that Helps Them Make Progress

To get people to switch from what they are doing now, which may be nothing more than being unhappy with their situation, you must show that you can help them make progress. To do this, you need to understand how they define a better future.

Ask:

• What does "better" look like to them?

• How does your product deliver that outcome?

• How will the end-to-end customer experience support their desired future?

Once you understand where people are coming from and what they want, assess how your product stacks up and where you need to tailor or improve it.

Step 3: Understand the Scope of the Problem

Ideally, you're tackling an unmet or undermet market problem. If you are, and this problem has a vast scope, you have the opportunity to build a big business.

Consider:

• How many people are in the struggling situation, and how frequently?

• Is this problem truly urgent enough for people to act?

• Whether current alternatives fall short? And if so, how?

If the problem occurs infrequently and affects only a small number of people, consider whether you will meet your growth ambitions.

Take into account competition, too.

It may not be the companies and products that immediately jump to mind. Current "competition" might be a product, a hacked-together DIY solution, or someone doing nothing at all, silently suffering in that state. Your steepest competition is a better alternative to solving the specific problem you are targeting.

Competition can be a spoiler that limits the potential scale of your business. If you execute flawlessly, but you're in a sea of companies that solve for your problem, you're in for a slog.

Read in the Blog: Journey of a Founder: A Startup Story

👉 Next, Get Going

Putting together what we’ve covered so far, ideally, your product solves an unmet or undermet problem (i.e., a situation where people are struggling to make progress in their lives) for a large enough market better and differently than the alternatives.

Next, you need to be sure you get the word out. This is how to do it.

Step 1: Make Switching Easier

Pulling new products into our lives is a change, and change always comes with resistance. Use a framework like Bob Moesta’s Four Forces of Progress to help design your product and craft your sales and marketing strategy and tactics.

Understand the math at play:

• The Push (from the current pain) + Pull (of a better solution) must outweigh the Habit (familiarity with the status quo) + Anxiety (fear of change) people feel for them to make a purchase.

We already covered how important it is to understand the current situation that's not working for people and what they want. To help cross the gap, from where they are to where they want to go, ask:

• What is infuriating and frustrating about people’s current struggling situation? What were the tipping points or triggers that pushed existing customers to act? How urgent is the emotional charge they are feeling?

• What was most appealing about your product to the people who successfully made the switch? Is there anything you need to change about the product to make it more appealing? What do people not know and need to know to make a switch?

• What are people doing now that's holding them back? What would they have to give up to change, and how attached are they? How can you make it easier to do something new?

• What are people afraid of? How will a change disrupt their current work or life? How can you make them feel more confident?

Once you know the answers to questions like these, your sales and marketing teams need to step up. They must guide people from the time they have their first thought that their current situation isn't working through a purchase. They must help people understand their problem and how to solve it using your product or solution.

Read in the Blog: What I Need to Know to Make Investor Referrals

Step 2: Show Up at the Right Moments

You need to target the right people—people experiencing the specific problem you solve. Consider where and when you'll find your best prospects and show up there and then if you can. It's not always easy to do, or obvious how, but try.

Ask:

• Where are my prospects already hanging out? For example: help people in a subreddit where people are seeking information to solve their problem.

• What are they doing already where you can bring something valuable and relevant? For example: be sure your organic SEO is up to snuff to capture people who are already researching solutions to their problems.

• Can you create your own “venues”? For example: host a hackathon if you sell a product or solution to developers.

Prospects are a moving target. If they have a problem to solve, they are either passively or actively looking for a solution. They are moving through a timeline that will hopefully end with a purchase. Design your sales and marketing to connect with them and ease them along their journey.

Step 3: Be Distinctive with Your Message

If you're doing sales and marketing well (i.e., helping someone make progress from a struggling situation toward a better way), you still need to cut through the noise out there and be distinctive. You could check off all of the boxes we’ve covered so far, and still fail if nobody ever hears about you.

I regard product “differentiation” as solving a specific problem better than alternatives, as we touched on above. I think about “distinctiveness” as how you get people’s attention and become memorable.

Reflect on:

• Are you leading with what matters most to your ideal customers? Are you speaking in your customer's words or your jargon?

• If a prospect compared you side-by-side with competitors, what would they take away? Is your message impossible to confuse with a competitor's?

• How do you show up in the world? Do people remember you after an interaction, and why or why not?

Without distinctiveness in your communications and customer interactions, you risk being invisible, even if you have a competitive solution that actually helps people.

Read in the Blog: When Don’t You Need a Fractional COO Like Me

Step 4: Pay Attention to the Moment of Decision

When someone has reached the end of the buying timeline and is deciding what to purchase, pay special attention to what you need to do or say to get them over the line.

Consider the clarity and transparency of your pricing. Look at the checkout, signup or trial process. Play through what prospects might be worrying about if the product turns out not to be a good fit.

Evaluate:

• Does committing feel emotionally safe? Do people feel confident to move forward?

• Is there anything—cost, complexity, uncertainty—that could still make them hesitate or turn away?

• Are the mechanics of the purchase process itself seamless and reliable?

You've gone to a lot of trouble to get someone to this point; obsess about optimizing the final step.

Step 5: Nail the Product Experience

By now, you’ve corrected for any product shortcomings, and you know you can actually help someone make the progress they want.

So when someone paid for your product, they had an image in their mind about how their future will be different and better. You shaped this impression with your sales and marketing.

They now want to realize the progress they envisioned. Ensure the product delivers, beginning with the customers’ earliest experiences. The road doesn’t end with the initial product experience; it’s just the start. Your goal is to reliably deliver what your customer is imagining—for every customer, every time.

How are you doing?

• Does the first use deliver a quick, meaningful win that reinforces the customer is on the right track?

• Ultimately, does your customer make the progress they imagined? Did they achieve some other kind of unanticipated benefit?

• After customers have consumed your product, have they made the progress they desired at the beginning?

If not, investigate where expectations and reality diverged. If so, capture the learnings and feed them back into your sales and marketing plans and product roadmap.

Read in the Blog: Deadlocked? Use “Forced Empathy” to Resolve Conflicts and Strengthen Your Startup Team

👉 Final Word

You can't force people to want what you sell, but you can understand people's struggles and show them a path forward.

When you optimize your entire organization around consistently delivering on your promise to help—every time, for every customer—you become known for being the best at that one thing. You become the first, maybe the only, product that pops into someone’s mind, leaving the competition in the dust. That’s how you build and sustain a successful new business.

Read in the Blog: Struggling with Growth? You Can't Create Demand—You Need to Find It