1. Start from product
Product is everything. You have to have a killer product to scale. Something that nobody in the market has. Start from there. A great product is like Panadol, something that people will buy immediately without asking for a discount, without hesitation, and they will refer their friends and family as soon as they experience it.
Top tip for finding the right product: read three-star reviews on other products. These customers like the product enough to write a review about it, but something’s not quite right. And there’s your opportunity to fix it.
The bigger the gap you fill/the bigger the problem you solve, the bigger the return you get and the faster you scale. Always start from product. You should not have to struggle to scale. If you struggle to scale in the early stages, go back to the drawing board and work on the product. It either is not unique enough, or it’s not solving a big problem.
2. Be clear with your USPs
Five steps to determine what they are:
- Come up with a list, what would your existing best customers do if your solution/feature/product did not exist?
- Group all the alternatives i.e “hire an intern”, “do it manually”, “sleep on sofa”.
- Rank them from most common to least common.
- List all capabilities (features) that you have, that your competitors don’t have.
- Focus on consideration features rather than retention features, why would a customer buy your product vs a competitor’s product.
3. Craft your sales story
Your story = your product. You scale together with your story.
Formula: Problem > Consequences > Current Solution (and why they suck) > Describe a perfect world > Introduce Product.
Example of one of our newer brands #makesense: your mattress sucks. The problem with mattresses nowadays is that they are disappointing. They all fall short because they are built for the mass. Every single one of us is uniquely different with uniquely different wants and needs, height and weight etc, so why do we settle for a mattress that is built to ft everyone? In a perfect world, we’d have a mattress that is built like Lego where we can swap in/swap out, and configure it exactly the way we like it. That is the mission with makesense. The new mattress is built literally like Lego so that customers are able to have the best sleep of their lives on the most personalised mattress in the world.
4. Be the small fish in a big pond
Determine a list of users who care a lot about your unique selling points, people who will be able to understand easily, buy quickly, don’t ask for discounts and who will refer friends. Create a list of people who would care a ton and ask yourself why they care. From here, you want to resist your entrepreneurial itch to want to conquer the whole world. Take a chill pill. Focus. Focus on positioning yourself in a ridiculously small market but one that will make you truly stand out and be the winner. Once you dominate one group, go after the next. Rinse and repeat. If you go after the mass market you’re doomed to fail (unless you have heaps of money).
5. People are key
Get the smartest people working with you who align with your values, who trust you and believe in your vision. That is absolutely the key to scale. You simply cannot do it alone.
