What Our Business Strategy Would Be if We Started Again From Scratch

Every Friday, we’re answering your questions about business, startups, customer success and more.

Happy Friday!

This week’s question comes from Sébastien Tromp, who asks:

If I had to start all over, here are the most high-ROI tasks that I’d work on from day one:

Product:

• Start with customer development well before we start product development. Learn everything we possibly can about our customers, including their pains, challenges and goals, and the exact way that they talk about those things.
• Built iteratively rather than spending too long and too much on a massive design at the start.
• Never stop aggressively collecting customer feedback and improving the product, but as we go along, learn to differentiate high-value customers from tire-kickers, and focus on feedback from the former.

Marketing:

• With insights from customer development, start blogging and helping our customers solve their problems. Drive customers at various parts of the funnel.
• Focus on SEO from the start to drive more organic search traffic.
• Build relationships with influencers to help drive traffic to the blog and to the product.

Team:

• Start focusing on culture from the beginning. If you’re not close to one another, factor team retreats and in-person meetings into the cost of hiring a remote employee. Especially important in a remote team.
• Look for employees with deep experience working remotely, rather than assuming that any talented professional would make a good remote worker.

From a high level, this is where I’d start. I wouldn’t worry about the details, but I’d focus on knocking each of these key tasks out of the park, and I’m confident that we’d be in a very strong position within a year.