What Are Your First Three Steps?
People love their ideas and dreaming of their future success, but most are intimidated by the planning process and what it takes to make those dreams a reality. If you’re not prepared to sit down and map out your entire plan for success, how about just listing your first three steps?
Everyone fantasizes about how they’ll spend all that money they’re going to get once they hit it big. They can tell you the first three things they’ll buy when their widget breaks every sales record on Amazon and QVC, but many can’t tell you the first three things they’ll do in order to begin production of that oh-so-successful widget.
Make a list of your first three steps
A list of three things is super easy. The first step should always be something you can think of and act on quickly — something like reserve the domain name or registering a company name with your Secretary of State.
Your second step may be to create a promotional one-page document that expresses the benefits of your idea and who it serves. Knowing the audience of your product or service and why that audience will find it compelling enough to hand over some of their money to access it is really important because charts the path for all the work that comes after, like writing a business plan and creating business proposals and client pitches. Frankly, I’d say this should be step one (but I know how much everybody loves to see if their domain names is available on GoDaddy.com and can’t help but want to order a set of business cards).
The third step that I always recommend is to get a down and dirty landing page up on the web and begin collecting email address of people interested in learning more about your product — or better yet — interested in pre-ordering it. The simplest landing page builder I’ve ever seen is Carrd.co. They have a free and a super cheap version. I suggest picking the super cheap version because you get a lot of bells and whistles added on to your features (like collecting email address). Another really good option is MailerLite. MailerLite is an email marketing program, but they include a pretty good landing page builder as part of their default service. The nice thing about using MailerLite’s landing page builder is that you don’t have to worry about compatibility with an email program — it’s all built to work together.
A Wild Card step which could be used to replace any of the first three steps I’ve suggested above is to simply make a sale.
Getting someone to give you money for access to your product or service is the ultimate validation that you’re on to something and that this idea might very well be successful.
Allowing customers to pay for access to demo versions, prototypes, beta versions, or to simply place their order in advance so they get the first production run as soon as it ships not only starts to create revenue from your idea, but it acts as proof to others that idea has value (and so does your fledgling company).
