Step-by-Step Instructions

Scaling to Victory

Welcome to the first exercise in the 5th workbook - your final workbook - Scaling! I am really excited about this exercise because it means that you have made it to the early stages of Product-Market Fit.

If you've made it this far, you can be confident you'll achieve your Victory.

Problems it Solves

1. What is Scaling?

This chapter will outline exactly what "Scaling to Fit" means, and give you an overview of how to achieve it.

2. How do you Scale the success you've had efficiently?

You'll learn the best ways to scale what you've already done - what you've already know works.

3. How do you know when you're done?

Finally, you'll learn how to know when you're done, and when you'll be able to officially celebrate your Victory!

Recap: Where You've Been

In the F: Finding Your Early Adopters workbook, you answered the question:

Is there a problem that customers are trying to solve?

...by interviewing customers to discover the problems they were actively trying to solve.

In the O: Offer Testing workbook, you answered the question:

Can you reach the people trying to solve it?

Could you find the right channel and the right message to represent your customers' problems, and capture their attention.

In the C: Currency Testing workbook, you answered the question:

Will those customers pay sufficiently for a solution?

You collected data on your customers' responses to requests for various types of currency, ultimately leading up to your Victory currency.

In the U: Utility Testing workbook, you answered the question:

Can you solve the problem?

In this workbook you focused on manual solutions to the problem that would ensure you optimize your Customer Lifetime Value and Viral Coefficient so that you could achieve your Victory.

Now, you're on to S: Scaling. The question you will answer here is:

When will you achieve your Victory?

You already have all the ingredients there: this is no longer a question of if you will achieve your Victory, but when.

What is Scaling?

There are 3 aspects of your business model that you will scale as a part of achieving your Victory:

1. Your Solution: The solution you developed in the Utility Testing phase was a manual one. Now that you have the data to prove your solution works, you will begin to automate it so that you can start reaping the benefits in a scalable way.
2. Your Channels: Throughout this process, you've been focused on one customer segment and one channel. Now, to scale, you will pursue another channel - and then another, and another - until you have exhausted all of the possible channels for your acquiring your particular customer segment.
3. Your Customers: Once you've leveraged all the channels to acquire your primary customer segment, you will expand to other segments. Throughout this process you've been focused on a specific niche - during the Scaling process you'll expand your reach. Your secondary segment is likely to be highly related to your primary one, but their needs will be slightly different. To discover them, you'll start the FOCUS process over again.

Take a look at how Scaling each of these leverage aspects relates to the FOCUS Framework steps that you've already completed.

Your very first step will be to automate the manual solution you created, at least parts of it.

If during the automation phase you run into problems maintaining your LTV and/or K Factor metrics, you'll roll back down to optimize the Emotional Delta your solution creates for your customers. In this way, you can ensure your automated solution keeps you on a path that leads to your Victory.

Once you've automated your solution, you'll move on to the next step in the Scaling process: Scaling your Channels. This is really fun because all you'll do is go back and repeat your Offer Testing experiments in a new channel, which you already know how to do!

You'll repeat the process with a second channel, then a third, etc. optimizing your Offer each time. In fact, you already have a plan for which channels you want to Scale to...

You outlined them in your currency calculator.

Once you've optimized each of your channels, the next step is Scaling your Customers segments.

Again, you've already done this before. You're just repeating the process to grow your business to scale. You'll roll back down to your interviewing process and interview a second set of customers. The problems for your second segment of customers are likely to be related to the first - so this process will be easier the second time around - but there will be differences. Identifying those differences will be the key to winning your secondary segment.

Often times you'll be able to use the same solution and the same currency for your different segments, but there will be times you'll have to tweak it a little to truly solve the problems of this new group.

That's all Scaling is:

• automating your solution
• repeating the process with different channels
• and repeating it with different customer segments

...until you achieve your Victory!

So how do you know when you've achieved your Victory?

Keep an eye on that blue line representing your Average Revenue on the Currency Calculator. As you Scale up your channels and segments, that line will stabilize above your Victory Revenue and you will know that you have arrived!

Topics Covered

This workbook will cover the following topics:

• Building you Dev Team

If you're not a developer, you'll learn how to create a development team.

• What features do you automate first?

It can be very tempting to try to automate your entire manual solution at once - but doing so will be costly and time-consuming. You'll learn how to efficiently automate your solution by implementing the features with the greatest Return on Investment (ROI) first.

• What channel should you pursue next, and when?

As you automate, there will be points to stop and move on to another channel...and times to keep automating. This workbook will teach you when it's more important to acquire more customers than it is to build another feature.

• What customers should you pursue next, and when?

Every decision you make from here on out will be a trade-off. You'll learn when it's a better trade-off to explore a new channel, versus explore an entirely new customer segment.

What's Next

In the next chapter you will learn how to build your development team.

You are so close and I am so excited that you are with me here, scaling your business to Victory!