The road to poor growth is filled with good intentions
Recently, on a community I’m part of, I saw a request for a logo to be designed. The guy asking has just started to see a little traction with the product he’s building and his partners felt it was time to update their brand.
They set a very small budget (understandably) and asked for people to pitch for the work.
Although totally admirable — visuals do matter to a certain extent — this is the wrong approach to growing something because it focuses on the wrong thing.
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Running businesses has taught me that being the underdog is a privileged position. You can do things that established brands can’t do. With a bigger reputation, there’s a greater chance of losing face.
With barely any reputation, you can do whatever you like and you can do it on a shoestring.
But that doesn’t mean you should do anything you like.
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There are two things that work for media and SaaS businesses that want to see genuine growth:
- Sell more product
- Give the product to more people in order to facilitate your alternative business model
Everything else is vanity.
Here’s some of the things that I have done when I should have been doing 1 and 2:
- Tried to explore additional business models too early
- Built unfocused communities to underpin slow sales
- Gone long distances to demo to unqualified leads
- Rebranded
- Created a lot of unfocused content
- Rebranded again
- Put in place good governance systems *
- Tried to build a twitter following
- Looked for costs to cut to extend runway
- Trialed alternative software for internal use
All of those actions are well intentioned but the timing is misguided. Focus on the basics of running a business — sales or increased usage are really the only things that will grow your business.
* This is always a useful thing to do but there’s a season to do it in. That season is once your traction is significant enough to require it.
