The Evolving Business Strategy

I was re-doing my course videos for the 3rd time.

It was a course on financial education inspired by the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

And I hopped to achieve two goals with this course:

But, neither happened.

The truth is that my first course was a sales and marketing failure.

I didn’t get a single follower, customer, or lead. Nor even likes or views.

But, if no one was going to watch my videos, why was I re-doing these for the third time?

Why did I spend 2 months and a half so focused on video & course production, while I was careless about the marketing?

Why before getting my first sale, was I already planning my taxes’ strategy (this sounds like a joke, but I actually connected with accounting agencies & spent whole days on blogs like Nomad Capitalist)?

The answer is simple, but painful.

In my mind, I assumed that:

Obviously, neither of these assumptions were right. And as Eric Ries wrote in his book the Lean Startup:

I mean, I would have been successful in a world where you don't need marketing to sell things, and customers come to your door. But, that world doesn’t exist, and we must deal with reality.

We all live by assumptions

It’s simple human nature.

For example, you wouldn’t be reading this article if you don’t assume that you’ll live enough to launch a business, or you’ll even be alive tomorrow.

Assumptions aren’t bad, nor good.

They just are the way that our brain can do planning & future thinking.

But, as you learned in my story. You need to be careful about them — they’ll literally determine your future and success.

Thus, it’s a good idea that your assumptions reflect reality as closely as possible.

So, it doesn’t matter how great you think that your idea be. It’s about how truth your idea is.

And if the man behind Amazon says it, we should pay some attention to it.

Keeping that in mind, let’s craft a business strategy that pays close attention to assumptions (these are the foundation for every strategy that you make).

A strategy that you can quickly update as your assumptions prove to be right or wrong. In simple words, an evolving strategy that grows with you.

A successful business strategy has only three things:

So, let’s start:

Not every assumption is the same.

It isn’t the same to say that people will use “Red flying cars” as saying “People will use flying cars”.

One is about the painting and the other about the whole product.

I call the most important assumptions: leap-of-faith assumptions.

Because if you are wrong on one of these, you’ll need to change your entire business strategy.

So, there are only three leap-of-faith assumptions:

Take some time to think and write these down.

With these assumptions, you’ll know where to go — and get a direction on business.

But, will this direction give you the rewards that you want?

How do we do it?

You’ll follow the next steps

I learned it the hard way.

A product isn’t a business.

My first business failed because I didn’t know how to consistently attract people, sell them, fulfill the order, build a team to scale it, or even how much money I needed.

But, as it’s said:

Mistakes come before mastery.

The truth is that you need to zoom-out and not only focus on the thing that is in front of you, but see the whole picture.

This whole picture includes marketing, sales, production, finance, human resources, etc.

Before you get overwhelmed with all of these words, I want to tell you that I’ve already found the perfect tool to craft the big picture without getting lost.

It’s a tool called The Lean Canvas:

You can download for free Your Lean Canvas template with the organce button that is above.

Now, to fill the template, you’re going to follow the next process (it’s important that you keep the next order):