How To Launch A Growth Company Without Investors

3 keys to bootstrap your startup into a growth company

Doing the wrong thing, in the wrong place with the wrong people will get you nowhere — even with the biggest of bank accounts. Use these 3 keys to turn your startup into a growth company without investors:

Minimal Viable Product

Less product is better: Don’t make anything without customer involvement. Mock up your product or service and test them on customers for feedback and improvement in several iterations. Make sure you focus on the desired outcomes for the customers, not the product specifications. The more you delay decision of the (expensive) production ready specification, the cheaper and faster it will be to build (because you know more).

Minimal Viable Market

Smaller launch market is cheaper: The smaller the market and the slimmer your target group — the easier and cheaper it is to find the right customer acquisition model and your delivery model. Saturating a small market with a finite number of customers with your product/service will teach you how to multiply the same in new markets.

Minimal Viable Organization

Smaller organization is faster: Only three roles are important for a startup: Customer Development, Product/Delivery Development, and Business Model Development. Anything else is overhead. Find out how to deliver on these three fronts without going broke, and you have the fastest moving startup out there.

Minimal Viable Investment

Less money is less waste: When you cannot afford everything, you become really picky and only do what is critical to get to the next milestone. Treat your business like it’s funded by a credit card: Only spend what is exactly needed. And when you are certain to get your money back.

You can always scale up, do more, move faster. When you first know exactly what to scale. Be minimal.

Kenneth Winther is the Founder & CEO of Moonwalk — a 100 days crowd innovation factory inviting people like you to solve grand challenges by startups.