Are Fewer Products Better for You

Are fewer products better for you?

Being an entrepreneur is a unique challenge. While you need to focus,
you also need to adapt. We live in a world that is abundant with
opportunities but only in selecting one and focusing on it, do you start
to succeed. Some entrepreneurs believe that when you pick that one
opportunity, that you must now stop adapting, and that once you found a
way to make money, you must stick to it.

There is some truth to the last statement. If you have found a way to
make money, then do more of it. If you are doing things that are not
making money, then stop doing them. But this is where the focused
discipline comes in – you need to focus on making your product better,
lowering costs, increasing margins and looking at how to continue to add
value and differentiate your product.

There is a massive world out there, and it is tempting to think that
you are not unique, that your way of doing things does not add value and
that you need to be terribly unusual to get your business noticed.
Having launched many businesses and products, I can state that if you
take a single idea, and you put in in a million places, there are 1% of
the people that go through those areas, that will buy your product.

It does not have to be good, but if it is, they will come back for
more, tell others and help you start growing.

Getting people to come back, is the key to running a great business.
You need a similar set of customers, to come and buy a mostly similar
product and you need to get great word of mouth from this. If you can
get this done you can:

1) Define the target market and do things that keep attracting that
target market

2) You can optimise your production/delivery process to create a
consistent product that satisfies customers most of the time

3) You can lower your cost of customer acquisition by getting one
person to tell another

Realising that these three concepts are the basis of good business
formation allows you to see that few products to start off with, that
are executed well is easier than to start off with a million products
and not get them delivered. You can them work on adapting within a
focused range and become a scientist in producing your product.

What is a product? A product is, per definition, something that
someone wants to buy. People will buy anything – we like spending, and
we like getting stuff. You need to look at how to ensure that you can
build an organisation that can deliver this product to enough people
that are interested in buying. If you have a great product that only two
people on earth can buy, you must potentially speak to 7 billion people,
through advertising and marketing, to find those two individuals. Not a
high return. If you can find something that could potentially be
attractive to 120,000 people in a town with a million people, the odds
get better. The best way to start this investigation is to spend time,
with the correct tools, to get a better idea of what makes them buy
specific items. Then you can refine your product.

The latest word to enter the entrepreneurship vocabulary is pivoting.
Pivoting is when you change your product or start focusing on a
fundamentally different target market. If you did your upfront research
well, then you should never need to pivot. A pivot is just a cute name
for walking away from an “f-up”. In our courses, we focus on giving
people the tools to do the market research correctly in the beginning so
that you do the micro-corrections to the target marketing upfront and
not while you are in motion.

When you are ready, and you have bedded down these products and
services, then you can look at follow-on products and follow-on
markets.

In my research, there are more than 25 different types of people we
call entrepreneurs. The one thing that they have in common is that we
sell products to customers. Start with a few, get it right and look at
better ways to get it done and what else we can sell the same people.
Over time, you will create a great business if you can focus on getting
the basics right.