Audience Stage Overview
Welcome to Phase 2 of the Fizzle Small Business Roadmap. In this stage, we’re going to start building your audience. Before we do that, let’s explore how you’ll eventually earn some revenue.
Note: at this point, you should have a basic business idea, a rough idea of who your audience will be, and a name and simple website for your business. If you need to get those elements in place checkout Phase 1.
A business earns money by creating something people are willing to pay for. To make this transaction work, you need two things:
- Potential customers, and
- Something for sale.
It sounds simple, but many businesses never make it through this part. Some fail to find enough potential customers, others fail to create something to sell.
Test your hypothesis
Finding potential customers and creating something for sale doesn’t guarantee a successful business idea. You have to find the right people and create something they really want.
Right now you have a hypothesis:
- You believe a problem exists for a certain group of people.
- You also believe you can create a solution to that problem in a way people will pay for.
- You further believe that you’ll be able to reach enough of your target customers to sell enough of your product to build a sustainable business.
There are lots of ways your idea could fail. Because of this risk, you have to work smart. You have to test your hypothesis as efficiently as possible. That way, if any of your assumptions are wrong, you’ll have enough gas in the tank to change direction and try again.
A very good chance
In phase 2 of the roadmap, you’ll grow an audience and build a product. Then you’ll mix the two together and see if revenue results. There’s a very good chance you’ll have to iterate on your business idea several times before you’ll earn enough profits to survive. This is completely normal.
As you build your initial audience and your first product, don’t aim for perfect. Your main goal is testing the hypothesis. To do that, you need to build a Minimum Viable Audience and Minimum Viable Product.
Minimum Viable Audience (MVA): this is the smallest audience necessary to sell a product to and prove your business idea can work.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP): this is the smallest product necessary to prove your solution is valuable enough for customers to buy.
Instead of minimum “viable” you might prefer minimum “lovable” product or minimum “delightful” product. Either way, don’t aim for perfect, aim for done. You’ll have plenty of time to make things better after you’re sure the business idea is solid.
In the next step, we’ll introduce several potential ways you can build an audience, and you’ll chose one primary method. Click the button below to continue.