Disciplined Entrepreneurship

No matter how you have become interested in entrepreneurship, you need to start by first answering the following question: What can I do well that I would love to do for an extended period of time?

Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah’s Inbound Marketing

Focus is very important because entrepreneurs have very limited time and resources and so must be hyper-efficient. Focus is so crucial to determining your target customer that I refer to the first five steps of the 24 Steps—from Market Segmentation to profiling your Persona—as “The Search for the Holy Grail of Specificity” (see Figure 0.1

Creating an innovative product where no market currently exists is essential to the success of a startup.

1. Is the target customer well-funded?

The 24 Steps are discrete and can be grouped into six themes.

Predictably Irrational. According to his research, when people are given what appear to be multiple paths to success, they will try to retain all the paths as options, even though selecting one specific path would have guaranteed them the most success.

“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it . . . your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.”

3. Does the target customer have a compelling reason to buy?

The single necessary and sufficient condition for a business is a paying customer. The day someone pays you money for your product or service, you have a business, and not a day before.