Procrastination is a Death Sentence. It took some solid commitment for me to start treating my business like a real business — that means keeping real work hours, establishing routines, and sticking to them – Glasbergen

There are a million ways to do your business. One system is doing better than others, and over time, things are changing. Technology changes. Attitudes and preferences of customers changes. So, business owners should improve their business too. This is just as true for developing your business as it is for personal development. You can always do better after you went through the process of first development.

In the past, traditional product development looks something like: 

  1. Spend months or years and millions of Euro to come up with the perfect product;
  2. Spend millions more to market it and hope people buy it; 
  3. You will know if you are succeeded or failed.

It is not a good feeling being aware that you will know results only at the end of the development process.

And how to avoid this? Your product can disappear in less time needed for its development.

Ryan Holiday’s book, called Growth Hacker Marketing, discusses the secrets of growth behind companies like Amazon and Uber. Through the use of the internet, a new model, called “growth hacking”, has emerged. The phrase is only five years old and has already gained significant momentum. You can Grow Hack both offline or online: it is essential that you do not have to use standard or high-cost channels for getting customer feedback.

Growth hacking is the process of:

  1. Start by asking your potential customers, and not by developing a product that has “potential”
  2. Create a “minimum viable product” (MVP) that you think will be liked by consumers; 
  3. Test that product with your final customers. People love to give feedback if the product is useful for them; 
  4. Make changes to the product using that feedback; 
  5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you have a perfect product.

By using this concept, you will get your product fast. It will be liked by your target group and, best of all, you will already have a list of customers, your testing group, not spending a dime on marketing.

Supporting evidence and practices

It is a remarkable story about how the book mentioned above was written. Author Ryan Holiday firstly sold just an idea about the book, explaining to his first 2000 customers what will be in the book. That’s it. No script, no promotion, not even a web page. He sold just an idea, an image of the future product. He just needed to persuade them, and later, they were selling the book to every friend. And it was a success!

A part of people’s mind is curious – not everyone thinks the same way. In general, lower prices are more appealing to your clients. But not every time. Reducing prices to reduce proposal rejection is the worst thing you can do. If a customer does not realise the value of your product, they will stop buying it, even if it’s 50 cents per month.

Slidebean.com, an Online Powerpoint replacement, increased their prices by 4 times.
Results:
1. Churn rate dropped down from 25% to 6,53% (x3,82).
2. Customer lifetime value increased from $22 to $444 (x20!).

According to Wikipedia, “Growth hacking is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify the most effective, efficient ways to grow a business. Growth hacking refers to a set of both conventional and unconventional marketing experiments that lead to the growth of a business.”

Things to consider

While you, as a businessman, will tend to use reliable, repeatable indicators to measure your success, you need to start to use your internal guidance system called intuition and rely on it. It will give answers to your tough problems as “good feeling about it”, as relief from fear or improved confidence in it. As evidence, that this is something a businessman needs to consider, is also the way how the EU evaluates SME instruments applications. The section, which evaluators will provide 25% of the points for the proposal is called “gut feeling”. 

Books

Additional resources and links

Entrepreneurial skills – never stop developing your business!
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