Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

My agency partner, Steve Turner, held forth the other day with his take on what entrepreneurs need to "get" before they can get funded, get going, and get ahead. The most important thing they need to show, said Steve, is a "top-line growth strategy". Things that get in the way of being able to do this, credibly, include the following:

 

1. Having a product, or a technology, that's looking for a problem to solve. This is the inverse of the old saying about finding a need and filling it. There are just too many things out there that are "fills" to needs that don't exist or that are already met.

 

2. Not being conversant with, or sufficiently knowledgable about, your target customer. Another way of saying that you can talk all day long about your product's features, but become mysteriously tongue-tied when it comes to a crisp articulation of the benefits those features deliver.

 

3. Having little, or no, feedback -- real world data -- from any early adopters who are using the product, resulting in scant knowledge about how the product is really being used, and how to make using it easier and simpler for so-called early majority customers who represent the next wave of users.

 

4. Having little, or no, hard data about the actual size of the market in your sights.

 

5. Ill-equipped, due to items 1-4 above, they go ahead and develop a biz plan anyway and maybe manage to get some seed money or venture funding to build out the technology in hopes that some customer, somewhere, will recognize the irresistibility of the concept. T

 

All you entrepreneurs who can connect the dots in terms of what the customer is doing with the product and the real benefits derived thereby will flourish and prosper. The rest of you will be baffled and frustrated about not getting traction -- despite all the third-party data that suggested a vast, lucrative market just waiting to be tapped.