A step by step guide to start, grow and sell your business.
An actionable essay highlighting the exact steps you can take to come up with a business idea that solves a legit problem.
Hey friends,
Welcome to Issue #25 of Market Curve - a weekly newsletter exploring the intersection of marketing with consumer psychology and behavioral economics. Through Market Curve, I hope to offer marketers and founders a different perspective on how to better understand their customers - one that is rooted in science.
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I’ve been spending a lot of time (read years) reflecting and thinking on how to launch a successful business. I recognize that there is no dearth of the amount of hustle/self-help books gently camouflaging themselves as entrepreneurial books. And while most of them are bestsellers, I am of the opinion that a lot of them are fluff.
The main reason being that they look at other businesses and find things that worked for them. The argument then goes something like this:
“If X did ABC to make a million dollars, then you must also follow suit”.
I strongly disagree with that. What worked for them might not necessary for you. But that’s not to say these stories are not valuable. But we must be mindful to take away things that we can apply to our business.
One of the first ways to do that is to look at things from a first principle perspective.
If you get the building blocks right, you can create your own home. Not a new Apple-esque home or even a Google-esque home.
A home that reflects you.
This is what I want to share with you in today’s essay.
But before we start, a word from our sponsor:
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Now you can spend your new found time doing things you actually enjoy (like sleeping).
What’s more is you get your pimping fresh landing page within 3 weeks (without going broke).
Since you’re such a cool reader, I’ve got a surprise for you. For zero dollars, you get a free landing page video audit for your website. Normally it costs 249$, but for you (you wily reader you), I’ll make an exception ;)
All you gotta do is type “Audit” along with your website url and send me an email by pressing the big black button below. And I’ll send you a short video explaining how you can make your landing page a money magnet.
We’ll start by dividing up the steps into themes. The first theme is:
How to come up with a business idea
This theme has 4 steps:
Open your eyes and look for problems around you in any niche, genre etc. The trick here is to question the status quo and find out what's wrong with the status quo. Write those down.
Once you find those problems, find out in which markets those problems exist. Find out markets that have significant number of players but not too much. It's even better if those players are incompetent and struggling.
Reduce the outputs in Step 2 to the ones you found in Step 1. In other words, you want to find the intersection of Set A and Set B, where Set A = output in Step 1 and Set B=output in Step 2.
Step 4: Do this process for 6 weeks.
Getting rid of the unimportant ideas.
This theme contains 5 steps within it. Finish the steps above before moving to this stage. Otherwise, it won’t make any sense.
Delete options you are (a) not enthusiastic about or (b) skilled to solve.
Check the market level of sophistication. Delete all in L4 and L5.
Quick Primer on Market Levels of Sophistication:
Level 1: No competition; Level 2: just growing ; Level 3: beginning to get crowded; Level 4: Users bombarded with offers day and night; Level 5: Polarized and market is dominated by 2-3 players. Find out what the average consumer is paying to solve these problems within the market. Delete markets where the ARPU is low.
Find out if the market is long-term (>7 years) and you can play long term games with long-term people. If not, delete it.
Make a list of all the markets that remain and the corresponding solutions to problems within the market.
Rank them on the basis of ease of doing it - how easy it is for you to do it. Start with the first rank.
Who will you serve?
Make a target persona - the person who has the same problems you're solving for. Find out what their awareness levels are.
Quick primer on consumer level of awareness: Level 1: clueless about his problem; Level 2: aware of problem; Level 3: aware of solutions.Turn ideas into $$$.
This stage contains 6 steps:
Research everything about your target. His age, occupation, desires etc. Everything.
Make a list of 500 people to reach out to - ask them if they're interested in your solution.
If they say, ask them to pre-order (craft an irresistible offer to make them say yes).
If you get >20% of people willing to pay for it, you have found initial PMF. Build out your first MVP.
If not, then, go back to your rank list and start with the second rank.
Rinse and repeat.
Learn more advanced techniques:
Via Market Curve, I'll train you or your company to take the next step in your landing page optimization. We also provide bespoke landing page copywriting and positioning services for these 3 companies:
Ideation stage companies: Get a quick landing page review/audit from a professional team.
MVP Stage companies: Get world-class landing page copy written by a world-class team so you can scale faster without breaking your bank.
Post PMF companies: Get weekly consultation calls, refine your positioning, write multiple landing pages as your audience grows and your product evolves.
At this point, you can do one of two things:
You can set up a free consultation call with us.
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Thank you so much for reading! If you want to get in touch, you can respond directly to this email or reach out on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Always excited to meet like-minded people!
Until next time!
— Shounak.