Take a moment and think back in time.
A time when you were starting your business.
A time you were talking with your co-founders about the future.
You were thinking of conquering the world, creating your own industry, disrupting the industry, making multi-million shilling deals within weeks of launching your product, hobnobbing with the ‘who’s who’ of the tech industry, hiring hundreds of employees and working out of a ‘Google-like’ campus tucked in a leafy suburb on the outskirts of Nairobi.
And then it happens. Your world comes crashing down.
All the best laid plans…down.
All the hard work…down.
Your business is in such disarray you feel like you are having an out of body experience. Confused and dumbfounded, you retreat to think and regroup.
Whether you have reached this stage or you are starting out your business, thinking small can do wonders for your business. Below are some ways in which thinking small can grow your business;
• When starting out your product development, make one or two working functions and test it out. Do not waste time making the whole application then you discover that the market doesn’t want it.
• Get users to test out the app. This will test the products’ functionality and the user experience which you can improve on and complete making that functionality.
• Convert the users to customers. Make them pay to use it. This is also validation that your product is market ready.
• Start out renting an apartment to use as an office and look for second hand furniture. Live in the apartment bedrooms and use the sitting room as the office. This huge savings will make your runway money last longer.
• Focus on building one app at a time, one project at a time. The savings on resources and time will be beneficial in the long run.
• Before you hire sales people, do the selling with your co-founder for at least 12 months. You should know the selling process, refine it, simplify it and document it before hiring. This way, you will know the sales process before teaching it to your salespeople.
• Build a simple free website using WordPress. Do not spend money on building websites when there are free resources online to do so.
• Learn how to pitch your product (YouTube has hundreds of videos) and enter competitions like Pivot East. This will get you the experience of pitching and meeting stakeholders in the industry.
• Start a blog/newsletter and educate people on how your app works. This content creation strategy will be valuable to your business in the future.
Thinking small, could be the competitive advantage your startup needs to become a business.
