All posts tagged: growth target

Getting Ready to Launch – Your first 100 customers

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Lessons from “The Minimalist Entrepreneur – How Great Founders Do More With Less.” By Sahil Lavingia Constraints lead to Creativity. If you are a minimalist entrepreneur the early stages of launching your business is all about constraints. You need to focus on doing one thing well and avoiding the temptation to try to do everything at once. Scope creep where a project or product launch becomes unwieldy due adding just one more feature and wouldn’t be nice if we could do this. Sahal Lavingia uses this check list to keep things manageable. Can I ship it in a weekend? Most prototypes of a product offering should be capable of being developed in 2 to 3 days Will it make my customers lives a little better? Is it likely a customer will be willing to pay me for this solution? Can I get feedback quickly? This first product does not need to be pretty. Maybe the best example of a popular but not pretty solution is Craigslist. It’s never been pretty, but it has always worked. …

More Ideas from Dori Clark’s “The Long View”

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Continually reinvent yourself – Think in Waves. That you cannot do it all at once is obvious, nor should you try if you are playing the long game. But do not fall into a trap that many professionals fall into. Which is finding an activity you are good at, and simply keep doing that forever. This leads to frustration as you begin to feel you have plateaued. Often this is because they have overplayed their strengths and ignored areas where they are weak, or they are afraid to take a chance on something new Heads Up, Heads Down. Articulated by Jared Kleinert an Atlanta based entrepreneur. Heads Up, Heads Down provides guidance on how to avoid the shiny object syndrome, the difficulty many of us face in avoiding chasing the next big thing. There is no shame in trying other things, but only when you are in Heads Up mode, where you are looking for opportunities, But not when you should be Heads Down mode, the time when you are focused on execution, getting stuff …

Are you too busy to be successful?

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Lessons from Dorie Clarks book “The Long View” Part 1 Rejection is part of every entrepreneur’s life. The proposal that is not accepted, the call that is not returned, the blog that attracts little interest, the client who terminates a contract. But if you believe social media, stories in the press, courses that offer instant income, you could feel that everyone else has the secret to success figured out and only you are struggling to gain traction. Maybe you tell yourself that you need to work harder, put in longer hours, expand your social media presence, start podcasting, writing a blog. These activities take time, and it is likely you are hustling as hard and as fast as you possibly can. You do not have time to breath, let alone think. Even though you know it’s not right, you focus on execution and the short term. What can you do about it? Dorie Clark suggests you adopt strategic patience. Strategic patience is the ability to do the work without any guarantee of success, to toil …