Nail It Then Scale It

Nail It Then Scale It teaches you how to craft the perfect business plan and grow your company by focusing on getting to know your customers and solving their problems then creating products to solve those issues.

If I walked up to you, handed you a million dollars, and said you had to use it to start a successful company, could you do it?

Chances are most people would be a little more than apprehensive about it. That’s because we know deep down that money alone won’t solve all the requirements to build a thriving business.

Too much money can even hurt your entrepreneurial dreams by breeding complacency. A startup with not as much funding, in contrast, knows what’s necessary and gets it done.

The success of 3D Realms 1996 game Duke Nukem 3D is a prime example. Without much funding, the company got the game out in about 18 months. It was a hit, and with the money, they began working on a sequel.

But this success had granted them too much time that the company only wasted. 12 years later the game still hadn’t come out of development and never ended up being released.

Another major pitfall of entrepreneurs is relying on a perfect idea and the passion they have for it. The blind trust that comes from your own inspiration can be a sure path to failure because it leads to too many false assumptions. When you build a product with the “ready, fire, aim” approach like this, it’s almost certain to fail.

Without knowing what your customers want, there’s little chance it will catch on in the market.

It’s obvious that the easiest way to beat someone at their own game is with a solid strategy. Business is no different, but the process of crafting a good plan isn’t always so clear. The foundation of your success comes from the knowledge you gain about what your customers want. Webvan, for example, was an online grocery service that shows how not to do this. Their failure to do sufficient market research made them grossly overestimate how much people would want their service. As a result, they poured money into infrastructure, warehouse stock, and trucks. But upon launching they discovered their terrible mistake. Their estimates of how many purchases customers would make was 60% too high. Webvan filed for bankruptcy in 2001 and lost $1 billion. Your secret weapon against a similar failure is careful observation of your customer’s purchasing habits. Consider how you can adjust your strategy to meet their needs. Once you have that, continue to modify it into a reproducible business model. In your business’s early stages, your plan will likely go through many changes,…