“Don’t find customers for your products. Find products for your customers.” – Seth Godin.
In Start-up Growth Engines, authors Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown and the GrowthHackers.com Team featured several startups who were able to scale freakishly fast as case studies and unpacked the practices they employed to achieve such a feat.
From Yelp and Uber to Square, Snapchat and Linkedin the book is a must-read for aspiring, first-time entrepreneurs and even seasoned business leaders.
The recurring idea is that the catalyst of growth acceleration begins by creating a ‘must-have‘ product or service – things that your identified customers cannot survive without.
In order to create such must-haves, a company must unearth what is called pain-point – things that, at the least incite a gnawing frustration or at worst potentially cripple the business – and then obsess about creating the perfect solution to not only alleviate but totally eradicate this predicament.
Back to Basics.
My biggest takeaway from the fantastic reading however is not the specific tactics these companies used to go on hypergrowth – and there are many – but rather a more fundamental principle of entrepreneurship.
In Business Class 101, the conventional teaching is starting a company by answering the question ‘what problem are you trying to solve?‘
I realized, however, this idea encourages putting the cart before the horse. Before we identify what problem our enterprise is designed to resolve, we must first identify who our target customers are.
Companies Exist for the Customer (and money second among many).
This business fundamental – identifying the specific customer you want to serve – is so basic, it’s often overlooked.
In truth, my inbox receives messages requesting for an Executive Advisory engagement because this simple idea was skipped over. I guess the reason it’s overlooked is because it’s so, well, simple.
I can count on one hand the number of engagements I facilitated where I asked the executive team who, as a company, is their customer and got one common answer. Usually, in a group of ten people, that question gets ten different answers.
This shouldn’t be the case.
An enterprise must create Alignment, Agreement and Accountability (Triple A) on who they are trying to serve.
In marketing, Brand Consultants call it a ‘Brand Persona‘, an attempt to identify what and how the target customers think, feel, what they say and how they sound, their level of education even to the point of giving it a name.
But that is only half of the equation. Aside from knowing who your customers are, the other question that must be answered is what essential value – one that they cannot live without – are you providing them?
This is the (not so) secret in creating must-haves: knowing as specific and detailed as possible who your customers and what their pain points are and then marrying it with your product and service.
One Last Step.
Who are your customers? What essential value – one that they cannot live without – are you providing them?
These are the fundamental guiding questions in building must-haves which lays the foundation for hypergrowth. The final step is drafting a statement and creating Triple A around it.
And here’s the kicker: when you use the answer to the essential value question as your purpose statement, you suddenly transition not just a product or service, but your entire company into becoming the must-have.
Final thoughts.
Making it practical, I’ve come up with a simple framework which I use in helping clients craft their own statement:
We are [Your Identity] who [What You Do] [Your Target Customer] [Your Purpose].
Here’s a sample from Start-up Culture Clotheshoppe, one of our businesses:
We are culture-shapers who inspire entrepreneurs in building the Start-up dream into reality.
Of course, what better way close this write-up but with FAHernando Consulting‘s statement:
We are Strategic Partners who help Executive Teams and Business Leaders accelerate performance by 100x.
——————————————————Florentino Hernando is the Managing Director of FAHernando Consulting, a management consulting firm with the mission to build great companies
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