Five, Fifty, Five Hundred — How to successfully grow and scale your startup ,

A really useful line of thinking i was introduced to by Niki Scevak from StartMate is the 5–50–500 path to growing your company.
 
Before you try to boil the ocean, you need to roll-out out your offering in a way that validates your business and gives you the learnings to fix problems in advance of any major blow-outs.
 
 Finding your first 5 customers
 Find 5 customers for your product from your personal network. Friends, co-workers, past employers etc. These are people you can use your relationship with to get them to buy your offering. Regardless of their doubts about your new business/product, they will hopefully take a risk on you. This is your fastest path to adoption and you need to actively push them for honest feedback. What do they like and dislike about your offering? What works, what doesn’t? If you cant get 5 customers from your personal network, then that is a pretty strong signal that you have something deeply wrong with your business and need to change before you consider scaling (or your personal network is the wrong market for your product).
 
 Expand to 50 Customers in your network
 If you have been able to get your first 5 happy customers, you need to test that it is not just your personal charisma that sold your product. Your next 50 customers should be people that you know as a 2nd degree relationship. This is important as it validates the customer pain beyond just your personal sales ability. From these 50, you need to learn and document their purchasing process, their objections and their adoption path. These 50 will teach you about how your product works in the real world, and will help you determine what you may need to change to keep them as ongoing happy customers.
 
 First 500 Customers
 After passing the test of 50 arms length customers, with these learnings you are now ready to scale to the mass market. Your next 500 customers will be people who you do not know, who have a problem that you have proven to solve. You will now use your learnings from the 5 and the 50 to create re-useable customer education and customer onboarding processes. You will have a product that creates happy repeat customers by solving a problem they have. To get these 500 you will need to use sales and marketing channels beyond your personal and extended networks. You need to find, test and explore these new paths to market and validate that you can acquire customers profitably.
 
 Good Luck!

Originally published at www.nickhac.com.