This is where successful businesses start. It’s the equivalent of the foundation that goes under a building or the roots under a tree. Everything else your business ever does is to support this one thing. Without it, you have nothing to communicate to customers and you have no operations that need to run smoothly. Customers won’t even start the journey without…
Category: Product-to-Market Fit
The Target Market Montage
Before I dig into the next series of posts on the three pillars that “hold up” the Business Bridge, I wanted to touch on Target Market one more time. It’s a major component in Product-to-Market fit that a lot of people struggle with. In this post, I’ll describe a few different ways of looking at target market, and hopefully one…
Business Strategy Basics
Introduction: I write a lot about business strategy and that it’s important, but I just realized that I really haven’t shared my definition of it. To understand the term “strategy”, it helps to realize that the term is a shortened way to refer to your business’ “strategic plan,” so whenever I say “strategy” you can replace it with “plan” or…
The Product Life Cycle
At lot of times when I get questions from business owners in a forum, I have to answer “it depends”, and one of the biggest variables is exactly where their product is in its life cycle. Products have a series of stages they go though, and the exact tactics you are using depend on where it is. Research & Validation…
The Top Three Etsy Seller Mistakes
Look at any of the dozens of Facebook groups out there dedicated to selling online (usually on Etsy, eBay, or Shopify) and on any given day, there is someone asking if sales are down this month. Their sales are down 30%, 60%, or worse this month and want to know why. There isn’t a month of the year that you…
Dealing with a Drop
One of the questions I get a lot goes something like this: “I used to have a ton of sales but the have dropped off!” The questions that I ask in return almost always get the same answer: (you can guess what it is now and I’ll tell you in a minute) Do your sales normally increase or decrease this time…
The More Effective Way to Pick a Target Customer
I was talking about this in my group the other day. It seemed to surprise people, so I wanted to dig into it a little deeper. There are two ways to go about selecting a target customer: (1) Make a bunch of items, see what sells, stalk the people who buy from you, and guess what they all have in…
One Step at a Time
There are so many tasks to do in a business, it’s hard to know which one to do next. You see all kinds of articles telling you which advertising platform to use or which eCommerce host is the best… but to a new business it’s kind of like talking to a brand new triathlete about which $12,000 triathlon bike they…
The Business Bridge: Building a Successful Business
Sometimes it’s really hard to know where to start or what to work on when you don’t have a good idea of how a business functions and how customers interact with it. This isn’t just about SEO or whether your photo background is white or gray or picking the right logo… it’s a much bigger picture of business strategy. I…
Where do I start?
I see this question a lot: what should I do first? The shop owner then lists off a series of things that are more exciting to do, like starting a website, ordering business cards, coming up with a banner, maybe getting some professional photos taken… but none of those are really going to get your business off to a good…