First things first, most of your potential customers are online, so you also need to be there, able to be found. Having a strong online presence is crucial in order to grow your business.

Having an online presence allows your brand to be seen and shared with a lot more potential customers that otherwise would never be able to interact with your product.

Some online areas to have a strong presence on are, having a good website.

All businesses should have one, here you can have basic but crucial information about your business. For example, I'm sure you wanted to check a restaurant before going and you could find their website, in the end you might be left with a lot of questions about the menu, prices, working hours, contact information. Information that plays a major role when choosing where to eat.

Not having a website or having one that doesn't provide the proper information to the user might make them less likely to visit or to buy your product. Luckily this is a problem that can be cheaply and easily fixed with the vast amount of online website builders that allow even the people with no programming background to create a website from beginning till the end.

Another great online tool when starting out are social media platforms. Having a good social media presence improves your chances of getting additional revenue and allows your customers to interact with your business and share it, allowing new customers to find your services and products.

Remember the huge amount of users these social media platforms have, so it's important to have a strategy. Keep in mind your target audience and have an active and engaging page.

One of the big reasons a lot of startups fail is because they design their first products based on assumptions. When bringing a new product to market, it's a smart idea to come up with a minimum viable product. This is an early version of what the final product might look like, its main function is to allow early adopters to validate the product and help with further development, having a crucial role in the improvement of the next versions and understanding if the product is valid.

It allows the gathering of customer feedback with not too much effort.

Companies choose to bring to the market minimum viable products because it allows them to release the product sooner to the market, and test early concepts in real scenarios with real users before committing to a full scale budget development.

How to create your MVP?

Before everything, the first step in developing your first MVP is to identify your company Goals and constraints. What is the purpose of this MVP? What are your limitations? Are you looking to expand your market reachability, or perhaps you want to continue focusing and developing for the markets you already have a foot on? All of this question will determine what type of MVP you should invest your resources to develop.

Following a well defined strategy plan you can start thinking about what kind of problem you want your product to solve, or what kind of improvements your product will bring to your customers. always having in mind that this MVP is only intended to solve a handful of issues and might have some limited functionality.

To finalise your research phase, we finish with an action plan. It's time to put the ideas in to practice. One important thing to have in mind in the last steps is the V. Your product above all needs to be viable. Meaning it needs to serve the function it was intended for and provide the user with a high-quality experience. Although it might be a stripdown of the final product, it needs to be something that can be put on the market and sold.

Many well known products of our modern society started as simple MVP products that over time grow in well established and recognizable names. Here we mention some well known names such as Amazon, which initially was brought to market as an online bookstore. Understanding that there was a high demand for online shopping Jeff Bezos kept adding more products to the platform and overtime grew into the biggest online marketplace.

Another well known example is Facebook, which started out as a simple social media to connect with friends, with basic functions. But thanks to early user approval the platform kept expanding and subsequently growing into what we have today.

Sometimes companies only spend time focusing on what their competitors are working on, or how their industry as a whole is advancing. This introspective analysis can lead to a great loss in new advances and business ideas.

In general companies tend to improve and come up with innovation, in different segments when they start analysing how different industries and their systems and technologies are being used.

You could call it borrowing, stealing, copying or learning, that leads to massive change for the better in both the company and the industry they operate in. 

This interchange of ideas allows an exponential acceleration, a recent example of this was highlighted by the Covid 19 pandemic. In the beginning we saw many industries taking notes of what was being done in other fields, and later would be applied. Reducing time and cost of trying to figure new solutions on their own and instead using existing and proven ones.

Whether you are just starting out or already have an established enterprise, you cannot stop learning and innovating. Get inspired!