It took me 15 years to really expand the size of my first startup company.
Although I am proud that a listed company finally acquired us, I don’t mind reaching this level of success sooner.
My second business-the story of a game company called individual Focus on making classic games more attractive and educational-different. Thanks to the lessons I learned from the wrong start and the wrong turn for the first time, I developed a process to accelerate our growth. Without external investment, in less than two years, we played more than one million games a day and started to make a profit.
The following are the rules of my oath this time-and my suggestions for other entrepreneurs to develop and expand their businesses quickly.
1. Find a low investment way to test and verify your business philosophy
When you Start a company, Time and resources are not good for you.
Even after you take the time to go Write a business plan, You want to find a simple, low-risk way to test your Business philosophy Invest in new products, services and products before investing too much in them. You don’t need to set a hypothesis and run it, but you can get actual data about what is feasible and what is not.
I swear Painted door test.
If you are not familiar with this product management method, the main point is as follows: instead of building the entire function, you build a button or fake login page for that function to see how many users are involved.
If it is popular, you build it! If not, you save time.
For example, we think multiplayer games may be an exciting addition to my game company’s products. Therefore, we added a button that provides a multiplayer option to investigate how many people clicked on it.
The results showed that less than 2% of users clicked. We didn’t spend a few months to build a complex function-and then discovered that no one would use it-we were able to quickly deny the idea and move on.
Compared to my first company, we spent more than $1 million and months to build the entire feature…only 1% of users participated.
I prefer to quickly find out where to focus my resources.
If you are looking for insights that have nothing to do with the product, you can still use the spirit of painted door testing to find cheap and labor-saving ways to test the waters. For example, if you are trying to determine the correct framework for your marketing campaign, try spending around $100 on Facebook ads and see how your audience reacts.
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Use these basic business templates, checklists, spreadsheets and guides to quickly track your business growth.
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2. Reduce losses quickly
When you conduct an experiment, you must really understand what works and what does not work—and quickly stop investing in things that the data shows are unsuccessful.
As entrepreneurs, people always talk about failing fast. This is how it looks in practice.
This is an example no Things to do: At my last company, we had an effective B2C (business to consumer) model, and a B2B (business to business) model that was working hard to gain traction. Over the years, we have tried to leapfrog the resources of both and put our precious time, resources and brainpower into the development of the B2B model.
But it doesn’t work at all. When we finally stopped crossover and focused all on B2C, we achieved a lot of growth.
Yes, it’s difficult-you may want to stick to an idea because you think it is essential to your business, or because you have invested time and resources in it-but if you want to grow, you have to be ruthless .
Do these low-cost experiments so that you don’t feel invested too much, check the data carefully to dispel any emotions, and then don’t overthink and move on where it doesn’t work.
By letting go and quickly reducing losses, you can open up space to invest in something that might be more effective.
3. Try out-of-the-box ideas
Like most entrepreneurs, your assumptions about what will help your business grow are often wrong. Probably nine out of ten, the strategies you are trying will not work-even if you have seen them work in other companies.
Successful entrepreneurs persisted long enough to find the 10% golden idea.
By conducting quick experiments, you can shorten the time required to cycle through enough hypotheses to reach the correct hypothesis. But it also requires a lot of creativity to go beyond the obvious and conceive new expansion possibilities.
In trying to figure out how to market our games, we encountered many standard options that were not very attractive: from contacting publications to try and get them to write about our products to marketing on social media.
Finally, we decided to try to collaborate with non-gaming companies to develop custom-branded games-the results were surprising. Partners like to promote them. We reached out to their audience, which helped us grow quickly.
4. Work harder
Once you have found effective strategies, you must focus your energy and investment on these strategies.
I know, I know: entrepreneurs are notorious for having shiny object syndrome-after all, if you Next Is the idea the best?
In addition, any smart company wants to leave room for innovation.
This is why I recommend that you provide some parameters for where you are allocating resources.
Try to spend most of your time and money (80% to 90%) on things you already see useful to your business.
Lock and continue to do what you are doing.
But then leave 10% to 20% to try new experiments. If another strategy emerges and seems to be successful, compare the data with your existing strategy to determine if it is worth reallocating your investment.
For example, if you find Content marketing Instragram is a powerful way to find new users, great!Work harder to make it an important part of you Brand strategy— Investment agency or paid media manager, so you can make the most of it. But then leave some room in the budget to fix TikTok or any other new concepts that emerge.
By giving yourself some parameters, you can avoid distracting yourself too much, while still leaving room for other potential strategies to conduct due diligence.
What is the best part of the whole process? This is a flywheel that can be used repeatedly. From important product roadmap decisions to formulating marketing strategies, it can help you make informed decisions and find new ways to drive business development.
