GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers
The startup journey is about going from fail it to nail to scale it to sale it. You have to:
- set up and fail at conducting the right business model and experiments to find a profitable and scalable business and economic model (fail it)
- fix what’s broken (nail it)
- then feed the machine so that when you put customers in the top, profits come out the bottom (scale it) or you create value for more and more patients.
- Then you decide whether and when to exit (sale it).
Peter Thiel, in his book, Zero to One, suggests that going from nail it to scale it will take having a:
- proprietary technology and barriers to entry, now and in the future
- networking effect
- branding
- economies of scale
Can you answer these questions?
- Can you create proprietary, breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?
- Is the time right to start your business?
- Are you thinking big and starting small, capturing a big share of a small market? Market share is the key to profitability.
- Are the right people on the bus?
- What is your innovation to market plan?
- Will you still be around in 10 years? Why? How good are you at seeing around corners?
- What’s your unique selling proposition, or, are you just trying to be the best of the rest?
What else? How do you get from nail it to scale it? How do you cross the chasm? How do you traverse the traction gap?
- How to build your personal brand.
- How to kill your brand
- Connect to the connectors
- Find customers one at a time
- Why coldLinking does not work
- What you won’t learn from Sales Navigator
- Build robust internal and external networks
- Partner up.
- Measure everything
- Have a digical sales and marketing strategy and execute it.
- Startup website basics
- The 7Rs of content marketing
- Why doctors are losing the branding wars
- The ABCDEs of technology adoption
- What you should know about dissemination and implementation
- How to sell your digital health product
- Barriers to AI dissemination and implementation
- What physician entrepreneurs don’t get about sales and marketing
- So, if patients are customers, how do you sell to them?
- What is the next minimal viable category? Have you identified a unique opportunity others don’t see?
As you can see, getting customer #2 (early adopters) is harder than getting customer #1 (innovator/evangelist). It takes people and systems, a sense of urgency, money and metrics. With so many employees quitting their jobs, don’t forget about the people who stick around.
Image credit: Pixabay
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