Mak­ing your MVP mar­ketable

Now it’s all about turn­ing your MVP into a con­vinc­ing offer for the mar­ket.

1. opti­mize your solu­tion

• Com­plete the func­tions: Ensure that all core func­tions of your solu­tion also work per­fect­ly out­side the test envi­ron­ment.

• Increase effi­cien­cy: Make the pro­vi­sion of your solu­tion or the cost of your ser­vice more effi­cient. Bear in mind that this is not always pos­si­ble, espe­cial­ly with labor-inten­sive offer­ings.

• Check scal­a­bil­i­ty: Your tech­ni­cal infra­struc­ture should be robust enough to grow with increas­ing demand.

2. fur­ther devel­op the MVP

Based on the feed­back and usage behav­ior of the MVP testers (see chap­ter “Min­i­mal Viable Prod­uct on the test bench: Test­ing the impact of an impact start­up”), you can now fur­ther opti­mize the user expe­ri­ence. Car­ry out reg­u­lar user tests to ensure that new fea­tures meet expec­ta­tions. This will min­i­mize the risk of mis­de­vel­op­ment.

3. expand your team

Expand your prod­uct devel­op­ment team and involve experts from areas such as UX/UI design, prod­uct man­age­ment and mar­ket­ing (see chap­ter “Sus­tain­able growth for impact start-ups: team, struc­ture and cul­ture”).

From ear­ly adopters to a broad cus­tomer base

Grow­ing means tap­ping into a larg­er share of your tar­get and cus­tomer groups and requires a well thought-out strat­e­gy. These 5 steps will help you:

1. pri­or­i­tize cer­tain func­tions of your solu­tion

For the time being, lim­it your­self to devel­op­ing ele­ments that offer the great­est added val­ue for your tar­get and cus­tomer group. Expand the scope only grad­u­al­ly around the core of the solu­tion.

2. improves user-friend­li­ness

Con­tin­u­ous­ly improve the usabil­i­ty, design and lay­out of your solu­tion. Use user-cen­tered design meth­ods to opti­mize your tar­get and cus­tomer group’s expe­ri­ence with the solu­tion.

3. increase your cus­tomer base

Expand your cus­tomer base beyond the ear­ly adopters. We rec­om­mend the fol­low­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion to start with:

• Inno­va­tors (3%): Inno­va­tion enthu­si­asts who are the first to try out new solu­tions.
• Ear­ly adopters (13%): Vision­ar­ies who rec­og­nize the val­ue of your solu­tion ear­ly on.
• Ear­ly Major­i­ty (34%): Prag­ma­tists who are look­ing for proven solu­tions.
• Late Major­i­ty (34%): Con­ser­v­a­tives who only get on board when there is broad accep­tance.
• Late­com­ers (16%): Skep­tics who are reluc­tant to accept new solu­tions

4. devel­ops tar­get and cus­tomer-spe­cif­ic strate­gies

Adapt your approach depend­ing on the tar­get and cus­tomer group. For exam­ple, you can empha­size the pow­er of inno­va­tion and your vision for the solu­tion when com­mu­ni­cat­ing with inno­va­tors and ear­ly adopters. If you are address­ing the ear­ly major­i­ty, focus on prac­ti­cal­i­ty and proven use cas­es. The best way to con­vince the late major­i­ty is to demon­strate the broad mar­ket accep­tance of your solu­tion and min­i­mize risks. Present your solu­tion to the late­com­ers as an estab­lished stan­dard.

5. uses suc­cess sto­ries

Tell sto­ries about ear­ly adopters to con­vince oth­er cus­tomers with these ref­er­ences.

Estab­lish mar­ket­ing and sales chan­nels

Noth­ing works with­out vis­i­bil­i­ty and a sol­id sales sys­tem. This is how you expand both in a tar­get­ed man­ner:

1. ana­lyzes the ini­tial sit­u­a­tion

First of all, you should col­lect as much data as pos­si­ble about your poten­tial cus­tomers: Gath­er mar­ket data, do a com­pet­i­tive analy­sis find out which chan­nels oth­er star­tups in your indus­try are using suc­cess­ful­ly and ana­lyze your per­for­mance data. Use tools such as Google Ana­lyt­ics, social media dash­boards or cus­tomer sur­veys to eval­u­ate your activ­i­ties to date.

A SWOT analy­sis then helps you to strate­gi­cal­ly eval­u­ate your exist­ing mar­ket­ing and sales chan­nels:

• Iden­ti­fy strengths: What makes your mar­ket­ing and sales chan­nels already suc­cess­ful (e.g. high vis­i­bil­i­ty through social media and SEO, high con­ver­sion rates)?
• Iden­ti­fy weak­ness­es (Weak­ness­es): Finds out where there is a need for opti­miza­tion (e.g. unclear tar­get or cus­tomer group approach, no capac­i­ty for cam­paigns).
• Iden­ti­fy oppor­tu­ni­ties: Think about exter­nal fac­tors that you can use for your growth (e.g. new trends such as sus­tain­able mar­ket­ing, coop­er­a­tions).
• Rec­og­nize risks (threats): Rec­og­nizes which chal­lenges or risks could jeop­ar­dize the solu­tion. These could be com­pet­ing solu­tions, a lack of resources or neg­a­tive trends that make imple­men­ta­tion more dif­fi­cult.

Then define goals for your mar­ket­ing and sales strat­e­gy using the S.M.A.R.T. method. The indi­ca­tors should

• Spe­cif­ic: clear­ly defined and unam­bigu­ous
• Mea­sur­able: Quan­tifi­able
• Attrac­tive: rel­e­vant for your goal
• Real­is­tic: achiev­able with avail­able resources
• Sched­uled: lim­it­ed in time

be.

2. deter­mine your cus­tomer group

Cre­ate detailed pro­files of your cus­tomers that include their pain points and needs. You have already cre­at­ed the basis for this in the chap­ter “Prob­lem and tar­get group analy­sis: how to val­i­date for impact start-ups”. You can use per­sonas or the lean­er ver­sion of the val­ue propo­si­tion can­vas for this.

3. fur­ther devel­op your Unique Sell­ing Propo­si­tion (USP)

The USP shows what makes your solu­tion unique and why cus­tomers should choose your offer. The tool Lean Can­vas tool helps you to for­mu­late clear sales argu­ments. For ear­ly phas­es, you should empha­size rev­o­lu­tion­ary aspects and visions; for lat­er phas­es, focus on reli­a­bil­i­ty and broad accep­tance.

How to use the Lean Can­vas to sharp­en your USP:

1. Prob­lem: What is the cus­tomer’s main prob­lem? Your USP should answer this direct­ly.
2. Cus­tomer seg­ments: Who are your cus­tomers and why is your offer tai­lored to their needs?
3. Unique val­ue propo­si­tion (UVP): For­mu­late con­cise­ly why your solu­tion is spe­cial. For exam­ple: “Faster, more sus­tain­able, more effi­cient.”
4. Chan­nels: How and where do you com­mu­ni­cate your USP most effec­tive­ly (e.g. through con­tent mar­ket­ing, social media or tes­ti­mo­ni­als)?
5. Unfair advan­tage: What makes your USP dif­fi­cult to copy? For exam­ple, an exclu­sive tech­nol­o­gy, spe­cial exper­tise or a strong net­work?

4. selects suit­able mar­ket­ing chan­nels and meth­ods

In the next step, it is impor­tant to opti­mize exist­ing mar­ket­ing process­es. Cre­at­ing a SIPOC dia­gram can help you do this. We explain how to do this in the pre­vi­ous chap­ter “Sus­tain­able growth for impact start-ups: team, struc­ture and cul­ture”.

5. select suit­able dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels

You can then devel­op a mul­ti­chan­nel strat­e­gy con­sist­ing of dif­fer­ent sales chan­nels — both online and offline. You should also opti­mize exist­ing sales process­es. Once again, cre­at­ing a SIPOC dia­gram can help with this (see pre­vi­ous chap­ter “Sus­tain­able growth for impact start-ups: team, struc­ture and cul­ture”).

6. train your mar­ket­ing and sales team

All strate­gies are use­less if you don’t get the rel­e­vant team on board. There­fore, con­duct reg­u­lar mar­ket­ing and sales train­ing ses­sions. You can find out how to iden­ti­fy exist­ing knowl­edge gaps and devel­op fur­ther devel­op­ment mea­sures in the chap­ter “Sus­tain­able growth for impact start-ups: team, struc­ture and cul­ture”.

Devel­op dif­fer­ent growth sce­nar­ios

Future via­bil­i­ty means not only plan­ning the ide­al case, but also think­ing through all pos­si­ble devel­op­ments with fore­sight. This is how you devel­op well-found­ed growth sce­nar­ios:

1. ana­lyze the his­tor­i­cal growth of your start­up

In order to cre­ate real­is­tic fore­casts, you should first ana­lyze your pre­vi­ous growth rates. To do this, look at your turnover in recent years and com­pare the devel­op­ment with rel­e­vant indus­try bench­marks and com­peti­tors. Also con­sid­er whether your growth has had a greater impact at the same time.
Exam­ple: A tech­nol­o­gy start-up has had an annu­al growth rate of 20 per­cent over the last three years. This his­tor­i­cal trend forms the basis for the fore­casts.

You can also use key fig­ures such as the com­pound annu­al growth rate (CAGR), the sales growth rate or the cus­tomer growth rate to get a clear pic­ture. The for­mu­la for the sales growth rate is:

(Turnover of the cur­rent year — turnover of the pre­vi­ous year) / turnover of the pre­vi­ous year × 100.

2. con­sid­er exter­nal fac­tors that can influ­ence your growth

In addi­tion to inter­nal data, it is impor­tant to take exter­nal influ­ences into account. With a top-down approach, you can ana­lyze macro­eco­nom­ic fac­tors such as indus­try trends, GDP growth or reg­u­la­to­ry require­ments. The bot­tom-up approach, on the oth­er hand, starts with spe­cif­ic com­pa­ny data, such as your mar­ket share or turnover, and builds on this.

Expert opin­ions, man­age­ment strate­gies and mar­ket sen­ti­ment can help you to assess oppor­tu­ni­ties and risks.

By ana­lyz­ing mar­ket and impact trends and untapped mar­kets, you can iden­ti­fy expan­sion oppor­tu­ni­ties.

3. devel­ops con­crete growth sce­nar­ios

You can use the col­lect­ed data to run through var­i­ous sce­nar­ios for the future:

• Best-case sce­nario: Imag­ine that every­thing goes per­fect­ly. Your solu­tion is quick­ly accept­ed, financ­ing rounds are suc­cess­ful, the actu­al impact exceeds your expec­ta­tions and your growth reach­es a new lev­el. Assume, for exam­ple, that turnover exceeds expec­ta­tions by 50% or that you gain sig­nif­i­cant­ly more cus­tomers than planned.

• Base case sce­nario: Base your plans on aver­age devel­op­ments and his­tor­i­cal data. Accord­ing­ly, you plan for steady growth, sta­ble income and con­trolled expens­es — your projects run as planned and most cus­tomers pay on time.

• Worst-case sce­nario: Here you assume the worst pos­si­ble case. This could include a slow prod­uct launch, delays in financ­ing rounds, a lack of impact or an unfa­vor­able mar­ket devel­op­ment. The result would be a slump in busi­ness.

Exam­ples: Assume that pay­ments from cus­tomers are severe­ly delayed, projects can­not be ful­ly invoiced or sales efforts fail.

4. derives mea­sures from the sce­nar­ios

You can then devel­op strate­gies to max­i­mize the oppor­tu­ni­ties in the best-case sce­nario, secure the base-case sce­nario as a sol­id foun­da­tion and min­i­mize the risks in the worst-case sce­nario. This allows you to remain flex­i­ble, react at an ear­ly stage and man­age your growth in a tar­get­ed man­ner.

Next step: Mea­sure KPIs

An impor­tant step has been tak­en: you have start­ed to make your start­up eco­nom­i­cal­ly fit for the growth phase!

Before you move on to mea­sur­ing KPIs and cre­at­ing a ref­er­ence sce­nario, you should also pre­pare your team, your struc­tures and your orga­ni­za­tion­al cul­ture for the growth phase (chap­ter “Sus­tain­able growth for impact start-ups: team, process­es and cul­ture”) and opti­mize your impact man­age­ment (LINK 2).