How to grow a business in no time at all
Think: how do I double the impact in half the time?
The promise of fast growth is possible if you hit on a vein of oil (with the trade off that it blows up in your face). It might make you rich but it’ll also leave you covered in a big oily mess.
Growth is easy when you have a product or service that sells without friction.
What I mean by that is someone sees your offering ONCE - and buys immediately without hesitation. That’s the best product-market fit you can hope for. You’ve created something new, that has a great margin, that is a no brainer purchase decision for a huge TAM (total addressable market).
Once you’ve cracked that nut - arguably the rest is “easy”. You now have distribution problem which largely requires careful Cashflow planning (or not, lol) and pulling on the biggest lever you can find.
And today, your biggest levers are paid ads, or “going viral”. Which one do you think is most in your control?
I used to loathe paid ads. It felt like cheating. I wanted to be organic and grow slowly and gently!
But I learned the power of ads when I saw the instant return it gave - it’s hard and foolish to ignore.
I’ve come to the conclusion that if you can’t show people your product in a basic ad, and you can’t sell it with enough margin to cover the ad and the fulfilment of the product - then I don’t believe you have found the right mix of product/price/people that then opens up the lever of paid ads.
But once you’ve done the hard thing of getting the right product and the right price and the right audience - growing “in no time at all” requires a lot of “fuck it let’s double our ad spend” and “fuck it let’s double it again”.
Then the questions you need to ask are:
How do we halve costs?
How do we double the impact?
How do we do it in half the time?
Thinking in these big swings will reveal to you higher leverage decisions - like fearlessly doubling ad spend - or putting in the effort to reduce your COGS by seeking other suppliers. The alternative will likely find you optimising morsels.
As
’s Sean Frank, CEO of Ridge says: “I’d rather have a sloppy $100m business than a well optimised $1m business”Anyway, hope that was useful. Maybe not. Let me know.
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Cheerio!