How to turn mountains into speed bumps

If you’re working on a side-project or you’ve left your job to start your own business, congrats! It takes a lot of guts to choose an “unconventional” path. Many times your family and friends don’t understand what you’re doing. Along the way to reaching your developed business you’ll have to harness this courage. There are always roadblocks, but you have to be confident that you can overcome them! I have some tips on how to make sure that your business is on the right path to success.

The most useful tip I can give you is to practice trial and error in your business. It sounds a bit reckless at first glance, but if you take small risks and you’re willing to correct course quickly it will make the process more efficient. The key here is to take small calculated risks.

This lets you make small mistakes that are in-expensive early on. You wouldn’t want to spend time and money developing an idea that your customers don’t like. To make the trial and error process as useful as possible you should start early.

This means building a prototype. Make a very basic product that meets the basic needs of your customers. If you’re trying to build an app that suggests restaurants based on your favorite meals, then build the basics. Your first version should be a simple app where you input your favorite restaurants and you receive recommendations. Yes, I know it’s not exactly what you had in mind! You wanted it to have photos. You wanted people to be able to rate restaurants, and receive their selections based on location. and and and… The list can go on! We all have the Perfect Version in our mind, but that’s not the point of a prototype!

What do you use your prototype for? It’s for testing and feedback. Have people who you think would use your app try it out! The feedback is the important part. If they tell you that they like the idea, but wouldn’t use it because they can’t figure out how to input their favorite places that’s great! You spent minimal time developing this and you received valuable feedback. You didn’t waste valuable time and effort making an app that people couldn’t figure out how to use. It’s time to go back to the drawing board, re-work the layout and test again!

This is a cyclical process of try, gather feedback, re-work. It can also work with a sales strategy. When we were trying to find our first round of clients we used insane techniques to try to find customers. We would go through Facebook Startup groups, find people who listed themselves as entrepreneurs and direct message them through Facebook asking them to buy our product. I’m sure you can guess how well that worked. But we learned early on that direct sales through the internet is hard! And people do not like buy stuff through Facebook. In a month we had tried and failed at direct sales, so we shifted strategy. We decided that a digital marketing strategy was more effective.

It’s the same thing when starting a blog. When I first started writing, I tried EVERYTHING. I’d do entrepreneur profiles. I tried interviews with our mentors. I’d write buzzy pieces about topics like voluntoursim. By looking at the number of people who actually read my articles and comparing it to the number of views, I found out what worked.

• Buzzy topics made people click on the articles, but few people actually read it. They tended to drop off pretty quickly.
• Entrepreneur stories varied in popularity. If it was an underdog story where they rose above the tough times and succeeded, it’d do well. If not… no one read it.
• If I gave people useful insights about a topic they’d love it, if not I shouldn’t waste my time.

While it’s a bit discouraging when you put in a ton of time and no one reads something, I learned what to write about.

You can apply this technique to almost any part of your business. Make sure that it’s a risk you can comfortably take. Don’t try to invest all your money into something you’re not sure will be profitable. Make smaller investments along the way to be sure that when you have to make the big decisions you know what does and doesn’t work! That’s all we want as we start our businesses. To make sure that what we do has a purpose and that the risks we take pay off in the end.

Are you looking to turn your passion into a business, and don’t know where to go next? Don’t worry! We’ve all been there, which is why we’ve developed Bridge for Billions to help you ensure that you’re on the right path. Learn more here.