#194: Lean start-up business basics - Tash Corbin, Heart-Centred Business Podcast

In this episode, I'm going to take you through lean startup business basics.

Even if you already have an existing business, it's a great episode for you to check in on whether you've achieved some of the key things that prove your business is going to scale and still be profitable.

And if you're just starting out, it's a really sexy, really effective business model. That means you can save time and money and also build your business with less risk.

Sounds pretty juicy, right?

 

So what exactly is lean startup?

In a nutshell, lean startup is proving your business and your model before you significantly invest time and money.

Lean startup, in particular, is focused on saving money. But as a model, it also saves you a lot of time in your business development journey.

What we're talking about here is making sure that people are actually going to pay for the thing that you want to sell, and making sure you've got the messaging, the price point, and all of the other parts of your advertising and marketing strategy sorted before you scale to large audiences.

So by doing things like small scale testing and getting proof of concept, you are able to ensure that when you do invest money to get large scale reach, for example, that you're giving yourself the best opportunity for that investment to provide a return.

This is particularly sexy for online channels because these days, we have access to larger scale audiences organically without having to invest lots of money.

We have access to test audiences through social media and other online platforms so we have an amazing opportunity to build lean businesses like never before.

Why would you want to build your business using a Lean Startup model?

1. First of all, it is a really smart way of doing business.

I actually started my business as a Lean Startup out of necessity, rather than by design. When I first started my business, and I've told this story hundreds of times, I actually quit my job. And then we went overseas for three and a half weeks, and then we came back, we'd maxed out our credit cards, I had no money to invest in my business, and I was sitting at my desk and it was like, Okay, here's day one. Now start a business.

And because of that, I needed to learn how to get my products and services in front of audiences without investing significant money. I had to learn what was working really quickly and what wasn't so that I could pivot and adjust and make sure that I was getting profit - scaled profit - as quickly as possible.

So I really do believe that I was blessed to have no money to start my business. I am very lucky that that was my journey. I know that if I had a spare $15,000 lying around, I would have bought a a fancy pantsy website that would have been probably quite pretty but not really say anything. And I would have done a lot of work on all of the bells and whistles in my business before I'd actually proven people were going to pay for my services.

And actually, on that first day, when I sat down to start my business, I thought I was going to be a career coach for ambitious women in the corporate world. So if I hadn't started my business lean, I would have invested all of that money that I didn't have into a business that ultimately I didn't follow through on. It was after speaking to just three people

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