Without evolving, most business ideas never make it till the end.
New business ideas are like experiments with totally unknown outcomes. You need to keep revising them and adjusting them, and to launch variants before you can find the right product-market fit.
If you’re trying to figure it all out in one try, you risk a huge chance of failure.
Amazon launched three versions in a span of twenty months before it actually started picking up. First there was Amazon Auctions, then Amazon zShops, and finally Amazon Marketplace, where Amazon found the right product-market fit.
Would Amazon have succeeded if it stuck to Amazon Auctions only?
If you study other successful businesses, you’ll find similar stories.
Starbucks sold coffee supplies and espresso machines for almost a decade. Nintendo made vacuum cleaners before it found its way into the video games market.
This strategy of “don’t try to figure it all out in one go” applies equally to small businesses. The major difference is that big companies have lots of money and resources to experiment with.
So, for small businesses, it is important to figure out how to evolve without lots of money and resources. Here are a set of steps that I hope will help you evolve your new business idea:
- Launch beta versions 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3 of your product/service in quick succession (three to six months). Launching beta versions helps you save time and costs, and also helps you study the market’s reaction.
- The difference between beta versions 0.2 and 0.3 should come from factoring in consumer behavior, interest, and feedback from previous versions.
- You goal should be to cheaply and quickly test ideas in the real world. Be flexible, adjust, re-adjust, re-launch, and gather your consumer’s pulse all along.
- Put processes in place to speedily gather feedback on what works and what doesn’t.
- After about three to five beta releases, if it still doesn’t look like your idea is working, give it up and move on: don’t get emotionally attached to it.
Most entrepreneurs give up when they experience failure with their first idea. They try to figure it all out in the first try—which is rarely possible.
A better approach would be to incrementally evolve your idea to find the right product-market fit. And, if it still doesn’t work after a few iterations—don’t be afraid to move on.